Lola Ridge

THAT was a great night we spied upon,

See-sawing home,

Singing a hot sweet song to the super-stars,

Shuffling off behind the smoke-haze …

Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river …

Lights dwindling to shining slits

In the wet asphalt …

Purring light … red and green and golden-whiskered,

Digging daintily pointed claws in the soft mud.

But you did not know,

As the trains made golden augurs

Boring in the darkness,

How my heart kept racing out along the rails.

As a spider runs along a thread

And hauls him in again

To some drawing point.

You did not know

How wild ducks’ wings

Itch at dawn …

How at dawn the necks of wild ducks

Arch to the sun,

And how sweet in their gullets

Trickles new-mown air.

As water, cleared of the reflection of a bird

That has swiftly flown across it,

Yet trembles with the beating of its wings …

So my soul, emptied of the known you … utterly …

Is yet vibrant with the cadence of the song

you might have been …

But ’twas a great night—

With never a spoiling look over the shoulder,

Curved to the crook of the wind.

And a great word we threw

For memory to play knuckles with …

A word the waters of the world have washed,

Leaving it stark and without smell …

A word that rattles well in emptiness:

Good-by.