The sandwiches are elaborate affairs:
toast, bacon, toast, chicken, toast.

We sip our coffee watching the rouged women
walk quickly to their seats, unsmiling, contemptuous.

Dark early and only the river shines
like grey ice, the ships moored fast.

Beggars about the streets
pray to God between set teeth.

Up by star and star
until the outer frozen blackness,

down the earth between stones
until black rocks in ledge on ledge.

One shoulder lower,
with unsure step like a bear erect,
the smell of the wet black rags that she cleans with about her.

Scratching with four stiff fingers her half-bald head,

The troopers are riding, are riding by,
the troopers are riding to kill and die
that a clean flag may cleanly fly.

They touch the dust in their homes no more,
they are clean of the dirt of shop and store,
and they ride out clean to war.

They dug her grave so deep
no voice can creep to her.

She can feel no stir
of joy when her girl sings,

and quietly she lies
when her girl cries.

I step into the fishy pool
as if into a cool
vault.
I, too, become
cold-blooded, dumb.

The dead are walking silently.

I sank them six feet underground,
the dead are walking and no sound.

I raised on each a brown hill,
the dead are walking slow and still.

A young man on a platform?
A white flame upreared in a silver dish,
Swaying to the wind of horns and oboes,
Bending to the undulate waves of violins.
Do you think you see a young man in a swallow-tailed coat leading an orchestra?
I tell you it is a white, pointed flame in a silver dish.

I have often a vision of your face,
Seen through the crossing branches of young trees.
Your face, as a white, flowing water,
At a little distance, beyond the reeds of a shallow shore.
Ironical, my lady, that Spring, the barb and whet-stone of my love,
Should net you from me in leaves and whisperings!
Yet I would not lose even this,
Although the sight and leashing tease me to madness.