Part 4 (1/2)

MEXICAN QUARTER

By an alley lined with tumble-down shacks And street-lamps askew, half-sputtering, Feebly glimmering on gutters choked with filth and dogs Scratching their mangy backs: Half-naked children are running about, Women puff cigarettes in black doorways, Crickets are crying.

Men slouch sullenly Into the shadows: Behind a hedge of cactus, The smell of a dead horse Mingles with the smell of tamales frying.

And a girl in a black lace shawl Sits in a rickety chair by the square of an unglazed window, And sees the explosion of the stars Softly poised on a velvet sky.

And she is humming to herself:-- ”Stars, if I could reach you, (You are so very clear that it seems as if I could reach you) I would give you all to Madonna's image, On the grey-plastered altar behind the paper flowers, So that Juan would come back to me, And we could live again those lazy burning hours Forgetting the tap of my fan and my sharp words.

And I would only keep four of you, Those two blue-white ones overhead, To hang in my ears; And those two orange ones yonder, To fasten on my shoe-buckles.”

A little further along the street A man sits stringing a brown guitar.

The smoke of his cigarette curls round his head, And he, too, is humming, but other words: ”Think not that at your window I wait; New love is better, the old is turned to hate.

Fate! Fate! All things pa.s.s away; Life is forever, youth is for a day.

Love again if you may Before the stars are blown out of the sky And the crickets die; Babylon and Samarkand Are mud walls in a waste of sand.”

RAIN IN THE DESERT

The huge red-b.u.t.tressed mesa over yonder Is merely a far-off temple where the sleepy sun is burning Its altar-fires of pinyon and of toyon for the day.

The old priests sleep, white-shrouded, Their pottery whistles lie beside them, the prayer-sticks closely feathered; On every mummied face there glows a smile.

The sun is rolling slowly Beneath the sluggish folds of the sky-serpents, Coiling, uncoiling, blue-black, sparked with fires.

The old dead priests Feel in the thin dried earth that is heaped about them, Above the smell of scorching oozing pinyon, The acrid smell of rain.

And now the showers Surround the mesa like a troop of silver dancers: Shaking their rattles, stamping, chanting, roaring, Whirling, extinguis.h.i.+ng the last red wisp of light.

CLOUDS ACROSS THE CANYON

Shadows of clouds March across the canyon, Shadows of blue hands pa.s.sing Over a curtain of flame.

Clutching, staggering, upstriking, Darting in blue-black fury, To where pinnacles, green and orange, Await.

The winds are battling and striving to break them: Thin lightnings spit and flicker, The peaks seem a dance of scarlet demons Flitting amid the shadows.

Grey rain-curtains wave afar off, Wisps of vapour curl and vanish.

The sun throws soft shafts of golden light Over rose-b.u.t.tressed palisades.

Now the clouds are a lazy procession; Blue balloons bobbing solemnly Over black-dappled walls,

Where rise sharp-fretted, golden-roofed cathedrals Exultantly, and split the sky with light.

THE UNQUIET STREET