Classic Poem

I

Here at the crossroads is the night so black
It swallows tree and thicket, barn and stack,
Even though the sickle of the new moon hang,
Keen as a knife, bent like a boomerang,
A witch's bangle in the Zodiac.

Black on the crossroads … but in skies off yonder
There broods a fiery gloom, a hectic glow,
Like the last twilight just before the thunder,
Or omens of doomed soothsayers, long ago …
To-day the veriest dog or mule would know
It only means a lighted town thereunder.

II

Honk, Honk!
On to the fork! Honk! Honk!
You hear?
From hand-squeezed bulb and belching conch!
Honk! Honk!
Down in the hollow now, but near.
How many there?—
Honk! Honk!
Topping the hill off there—
Behind the foremost cone of glare—
That, like the swift typhoon,
Sweeps on along each length of rut
And makes their ridges as clear cut
As in Uganda at high noon
Stand out the Mountains of the Moon.
Honk,—for the brasses and cat-gut!
Honk, Honk,—for cymbals and bassoon!
New times, new music and new fun!
Though Bottom's gone and Oberon,
With Satyr, Dwarf, and pet Baboon,
Midsummer nights have still their rites.
Honk, Honk: “We've caught the coon!”
(“Honk” means they've caught the coon.)

III

They stop—they jerk—they chug—they back.
And in a monstrous ring they park,
With ghostly cones converging from the dark
Upon a central tree all split and black,
Whose limbs and leaves are caverned out of sight
In the eternity of night.
It's like a magic circle where
Snake-dancers, stripèd, brown, and bare,
With pouch in waving hand and horns on hair,
In old times swayed and swung
And called on Tunga-Tung,
With nasal ang and guttural unk
Around a lightning-blasted trunk,
Or hissed in chorus with a serpent-stare.
Yet nothing like this there—
It's only the sign-board of the town's,
And crossroads cottonwood by Farmer Brown's.

IV

It's only twelve true men in pants and coats
(The sort who pay their bills, and cast their votes,
Or file to jury boxes on hot afternoons) …
Each with a finger on a trigger,
Dragging by ropes, around his gullet tied,
With hobbled legs and arms well lashed to side,
The best of all buffoons—
A banjo-boy and jigger,
A hovel-doorway bawler of coarse tunes.
Like Caliban he shuffles, only bigger;
Or Orang-outang, only larger-eyed—
A bandy-leggèd nigger,
Quite jerky, but all silent down inside.

V

They take the rope off at the tree—perhaps
Won't hang him after all?—These humorous chaps!
Just make him dance amid the glare
For women-folk and boys and girls back there,
Still in their seats?
Make him show off his feats?—
Stand on his head-piece while he eats
Hoe cakes or possum sweets?
Or turn him up, and have him wag his ears;
Or wriggle and wrinkle scalp and brow,
Like a fly-bitten back of Holstein cow,
And throw from pate a bowl or plate,
While underneath he grins and leers?—
He'll butt his thick skull 'gainst the trunk, I think,
And then draw back, guffaw, and wink.

VI

Not so. They pay a chain out link by link.
Hear it rattle, hear it clink!
A good stout chain so much can do!—
As dancing bear and old-time showman knew,
Or bloodhound leashed at kennel door in straw.
And down along the Nile,
With Pharaoh's Sphinx in view,
The Coptic coolies, with a chain or two
Around his belly, tail, and jaw,
Aboard the freighter hoist the crocodile
For Circus or for Zoo—
A stout chain holds,
Come fear or fire, whatever's in its folds.

VII

They strip him, overalls and shirt,
They set his back against the tree,
They wind the links so tight about,
In girdles two and three. . . .
And yet it hardly seems to hurt,—
For not a word says he.
Honk! Honk!

VIII

He stands five fathoms deep in glare agrin.
Honk, Honk! Honk, Honk!
His skin-bark on the tree bark-skin,
Trunk grafted on to trunk.
Honk! Honk! …
The graft should take, for they are close of kin,—
Both sprung of one old soil of earth,
Both fed on rain and air and dirt from birth,
Both tough and stark and thin …

IX

One steps with jack-knife up. And he
Will cut the bark—of which dark tree?
Nigger or cottonwood?—With that
He gelds him like a colt or cat!
But the coon's caterwauls and wails
(Honk, Honk! Honk, Honk!)
Fall thin and blurred and flat—
While every conch-horn at him rails:
“No more he'll spawn in bush or bed,
With cocaine crazed, with whiskey drunk,
A charcoal woolly head,
Or yellow half-breed brat!”
Honk, Honk!

X

Another comes with brush and pot,
And smears him over, as with ointment hot.
Honk! Honk!
Good fellow, at your trellised house in town,
You boil the tar to indigo and brown,
Shimmering in sunshine, bubbling to the brim—
Why waste it at the crossroads here on him?
Tar on your upturned row-boat sinks
Makes you a roadbed firm and fit;
Tar on your upturned row-boat sinks
In all the nail-holes, joints, and chinks;
Tar on your gadding daughter's white kid shoe
Was black, and tickled you all through;
But, brother, with the brush and pot,
Tar does no good on hide of Hottentot—
Or have you feathers in a bag or two?—
If so, by now, he'd just as lief as not.
Honk! Honk!

XI

With rags, and straw, and sticks, and other toys,
In run the women-folk and girls and boys.
They'll prod his ribs? tickle his arm-pits? sop
His sweating cheeks, as with a pantry mop?
Such crossroads pranks are not just right
For decent town-folk, it would seem. . . .
(Or is this only a midsummer dream
In innocent midnight?) . . . .
Besides they haven't the heart. They drop
Their knickknacks at black angles and bare feet,
And cool him from the spouts of cans
(Fetched from below-stairs, under washing pans
Porcelain-lined and scoured so white).
And then they all, excepting one, retreat,
Back through the length of light.

XII

This one is honored over every other,—
She is the dead child's Mother.
And the two glare and glare
At one another
In two eternities of hate and pain,
Yet with such monstrous union in despair,
Such hideous sameness in their haggard shapes,
The one, the other,
That you would say the twain
Seemed like a savage sister and twin-brother
Dying of hunger out among the apes.

XIII

Her hand is clutching her unsuckled breast—
You know the rest:
The bloody curls, the dainty skirt a shred,
The sprawling hand-prints on the legs and head,
Her body's little body in a shed. . . .
Then down she kneels;
You see her hunched back and her upturned heels. . . .
But not the scratch and scratch,
Not the small flame that tips the second match. . . .
And not her hands, her face, her hank of hair,—
As when a Java woman kneels in prayer,
Under a temple-hut of thatch,
Before some devil-idol standing lone,—
Not far from jungles and the tiger's lair,—
Carved from the teak-wood to a jet-black face,
With Pagan wrinkles, curving pair by pair,
With set grimace,
And two great eyeballs, staring white in stone …
Whilst smoke curls roofward from its hidden base. . . .

The Mother rises … will depart …
Her duty done … and her desire. . . .
And as she turns, you see a strange
And quiet rapture of most uncouth change.
For from her burning marrow, her crazed heart,
She has transferred the fire
Of horror and despair
To the dumb savage there. . . .
She has transferred, she thinks, the fire to him.
Honk, Honk! let lights be dim!
(And now the lights are dim.) …

XIV

And for a moment is the night so black
It swallows tree and coon and all the pack,
And lets the sickle of the new moon hang,
Keen as a knife, bent like a boomerang,
A witch's bangle in the Zodiac.

XV

Gone is the light that played upon the tree,
But at the cottonwood's own base
Another light now takes its place—
And there is still so much for us to see.
Honk! Honk!
There have been many bonfires on the earth,
Born out of many moods and needs of men:
As when the maskers, in their twilight mirth
On Wessex heaths, would burn Guy Fawkes again;
As when the bustling country-side in dread
Against the Armada's coming set the beacons,
In the heroic English days, on Beachy Head,
When the midsummer sea-winds blew;
As when the village dames and Yankee deacons
Out on the common had a barbecue;
As when the boys in South and North
Still make the boxes blaze and crackle on the Fourth.
The ghouls and witches too
In olden times and regions far away
Danced at their wonted rendezvous
Upon the Brocken on the first of May,
Screaming round the bonfire's light
All through Walpurgis Night.—
Honk! Honk!

There is much fascination in a flame,—
Not least, whenever it has sprung
In intertwining tongue and tongue,
And left the one small spot from whence it came—
Faster, faster, higher, higher,
Shapes of wing, and wave, and lyre,
Shapes of demon-heads and peakèd caps
And flying smocks, and shreds and scraps
Of all fantastic things without a name.
Tongue after tongue in middle air—
Snatched from existence, how and where?—
There is much fascination in a flame—
Not least, when it is yellow, blue, and red,
With blackness for a background and a frame,
Still fuel-fed
With straw and wood and tar and kerosene,
And some organic matter still alive.—
Its witcheries of color, how they strive!—
Even though some smudge and smoke may get between.

XVI

Yet two vast bloodshot eyeballs by their might
Out-top the flame, though from the flame their light—
Two eyeballs wrought (like eyeballs of the steer's
Or dog's, or cat's, or woodchuck's, or a deer's)
By one blind Nature in a mammal's womb,—
By one Herself with neither eyes nor ears,
Nor birth, nor breath, nor doom.

The two vast eyeballs grow and grow,
Till, to the masters of the revels,
They seem the eyeballs of the devil's
Ascending from hell-fire down below.
The masters will not have it so:
A pole, all glowing charcoal at the tip,—
Zip, Zip! Zip, Zip!
Honk, Honk! Honk, Honk!
And the blind savage at the flaming tree
No more will glare so monstrously.

XVII

But on the crossroads our midsummer dream
Converts each flame into a scream, a scream—
A shriek, a shriek!
The horns honk at them as a hose at fire;
But still with every honk they come,
Shriek after shriek,
But fiercer, faster, higher!
(And all the while before, he was as dumb
As Roman martyr, schooled to turn the cheek.)
Honk, honk, away to left and right!—
Between the honking and the shrieking black
The odds (awhile) are ten to one to-night
In favor of the blazing maniac!
All ancient Africa is in his yells:
The wounded zebra's neighing, the gazelle's
Fierce whinny at the salt-lick, and the goat's;
The roars of lions, with distended throats,
Over the moonlit rocks for hollow hunger;
The bellowing elephants, with jaws agape,
And lifted trunks that thrash across their backs
Like writhing pythons or the great sea-conger,
Their monstrous hindlegs bogged beyond escape
In fire-swept jungles off their beaten tracks.
All Africa is in the negro's shrieks:
The forests with their thousand parrot-beaks,
From Nile and Congo to the Cape;
But the Gorilla, the man-ape,
With his broad, hairy, upright chest,
Seems to out-scream the rest.
All Africa is in his agony:
The human ladings at the western coast,
The slave-ship, and the storm at sea,
The naked bodies (never very old)—
Dragged, sick and crippled, from the fetid hold
And over the pitching gunwales tossed,
Both male and female, overboard,
While sharks, careening on their backs,
In the green swells with scudding foam astreak,
Ate up the blacks,
And crew and captain prayed the Lord,
Or crammed fresh oakum in the leak.
All Africa is on his lips:
The million sweats, the million bloody whips,
The million ankles festering in a cord—
The unborn baby still between the hips,
The bent gray head along the rice-swamp humming,
“O Massa Gawd, I'se coming.”

XVII

His voice has come from other times and places. . . .
And hence away it carries far and far. . . .
For in mid-darkness, level with a limb,
Above the flames and smoking tar,
Ride feather-crested heads that bob at him,
With peering faces,
There—and—there—and there!
Faces, Faces,
Sudden and weird as those that loom and peep
Upon us nightly just before we sleep.
No hands, nor arms, nor tomahawks you see,
No thighs in buck-skins dyed and slashed,
No moccasin, no foot, no knee,
Not even a copper torso brave and bare
From many a war-path scarred and gashed—
But only faces, faces, faces,
Riding in the air—
Faces, faces, faces, faces,
Feather-crested with long braided hair,
Peering with an old desire
From the gloom upon the fire,
Summoned back from Otherwhere. . . .
Summoned back from What-has-been:
“Is that a Jesuit father at the stake
Burning for his Jesus' Sake?—
He hung us crosses round our necks to save—
But when the Mohawks to our village came
They killed both squaw and brave;
We Hurons put the Mumble-Jumble to the flame.
The cross it was no good to make us win—
It was bad medicine!”
And Seminole, Pawnee, and Sioux,
Apache, Blackfoot, Chippewa, and Crow,
Each gloats as if he saw anew
His own best captive of the long ago. . . .

XIX

The faces fade away. . . .
The Negro's cries
Have joined the uncouth sounds of Yesterday—
The incantations to the blood-red moon,
The ululations in the eclipse at noon,
The old palm-island lullabies
That ring-nosed crones were used to croon,
Squatting circle-wise. . . .
And the twelve Shadows to the fire fling
Great logs with fungus, spines, and rotted pith,
And great dead boughs with thin and sprawling arms
(Fetched from about a long abandoned spring,
And toad-stool woodlots of surrounding farms)
As if to cage in wickerwork therewith
(Like the wild people of a South-Sea myth)
The Demon-in-fire from everything it harms. . . .

The Negro's corpse will take strange shapes,
As the flames gnaw it, flesh and bone;
But neither men shall see, nor apes,
For it shall burn from now alone. . . .

Alone … and up and up … and down and down. . . .
While honkers honk it back to town.

XX

At last the stench, or glow of embers, brings
The wolves, or wolf-like things …
Such as on earthquake midnights prowl around
Smoulder of fallen beams and littered ground,
And tear from dead hands golden finger-rings.
But though they crouch in slow two-leggèd stealth,
Their hunt is not for wealth.
They paw into the cinders, as with hooks …
Snatch something out,
With gloating, starveling looks …
A bit of rib … or skull … or crup …
Hot ash and finger knuckle …
They wrap them up,
And putter round about …
And chuckle …
And foot it off and down the road,
Past the weasel, skunk, and toad,
The barnyard rat,
The hooting owl and the whirring bat.

XXI

But over the spot of glowing embers, listen,
The poplar's leaves are rustling like the rain
That patters on my garden-shrubs by night. . . .
The dew may glisten,
The south-wind come this way again,
And wander thither,
But the charred cottonwood has caught the blight. . . .
Its leaves shall wither.
Here on the fork, except that spot of red
(Still fierce as some primordial desire),
All lust is dead:
The lust to breed, the lust to burn;
The rut of flesh, the glut of fire. . . .
Lift up the head,
If still you can, and turn
To the great spaces of the skies.
Black … black … all black …
The moon has set,—perhaps elsewhere to hang,
Keen as a knife, bent like a boomerang,
A witch's bangle in the Zodiac …
Black … black … all black …
Though dawn be pregnant with her enterprise,
And stars perhaps will keep …
Black … black … and over yonder,
The glow is gone from all the town thereunder …
And all the people sleep … and sleep … and sleep.