Amy Lowell

PIERROT had grown old.

He wore spectacles

And kept a shop.

Opium and hellebore

He sold

Between the covers of books,

And perfumes distilled from the veins of old ivory,

And poisons drawn from lotus seeds one hundred years withered

And thinned to the translucence of alabaster.

He sang a pale song of repeated cadenzas

In a voice cold as flutes

And shrill as desiccated violins

I stood before the shop,

Fingering the comfortable vellum of an ancient volume,

Turning over its leaves,

And the dead moon looked over my shoulder

And fell with a green smoothness upon the page.

I read:

“I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have none other gods but me.”

Through the door came a chuckle of laughter

Like the tapping of unstrung kettledrums,

For Pierrot has ceased singing for a moment

To watch me reading.