Oldies

From thine own partner in tomfoolery. Please pardon the mess while we relocate to our new office just down the street.

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Dialogue

BOY. Hallo! My dear! I’ve missed you.
GIRL. Oh, hello, there. I must have missed you, too; I am too forgetful now to remember whether it was so.
BOY. Oh, dear.
GIRL. Do you hear a nightingale? There is singing in the distance, a little ways, there.
BOY. I hear no-thing, my love. And it is noon-time, I should expect that there are no nightingales yet.
GIRL. Is it only noon-time? It mustn’t be, I’m sure it isn’t. It’s much too dark. My head is so thick I don’t know which way is up now, and I’ve been sleeping as if to keep alive! I only woke quarter-hour ago. Or did I wake? Perhaps I’m still asleep. I’ve been having such queer dreams lately, you know. Oh, how confusing! Dear, are you awake?
BOY. I should think so, my love.
GIRL. Oh, but Professor Tupper says not one of us thinks for herself, not really. It is an interesting theory. She says we ought to feel from the heart, that’s what we really ought to do. It’s all we can do. The human-hearted are the hardiest humans, or something in that key. I imagine she is on to something, there’s just too much wretched preciousness fatting up the air nowadays.
BOY. I’m not so sure I think too much of your Professor, sometimes.
GIRL. Of course you don’t. It’s just as Professor says, none of us little things can think a whit!
BOY. Alas. Naturally. She is quite a wit herself.
(Gives a little cough) Darling, have you heard, the new picture is playing at Sachman’s to-night?
GIRL. (Yawning) Is that so, dear? I am so tired. Perhaps I shall go for a coffee.
BOY. You know what the coffee does to you, love. We shouldn’t like an incident like last time.
GIRL. Time! Oh, dear. What time is it, love? Why don’t you wear your watch? The lovely thing your grandfather gave you last Christmas. Why don’t you wear it? It really is so lovely.

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I am halfway dead, and it hardly matters a whit. Whatever comes to my head is lousy in logic and only a vain attempt at enlightened thought – oh vanity of vanities…. Let us go to sleep now.

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Little atoms wander wayward, alas!

O little atoms wayward striving!
Thy distant thought rejects the lonely heart
A-tower’d in the highest crib, a bulb
That teeters with a proof, a colder sigh
A man aloof – and the little girl
A-slumber here! Is she goodly, is she fair?
She slips to God a quiet prayer, but soon
She’s falling fast asleep, a long and silent
Sillion-sleep. A pretty sleep she sleeps.

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The swallow by my glass was a small bird and I said, Small bird, won’t you keep your spirits? There is mightiness in being small. And he made reply by flying to a distant bough.

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Five-and-twenty men
Went walking glen to glen
All thick with overheat
And dreaming of sweetmeat
When in the russet afternoon
A long-bottom named Sargeant Loon
Barked orders to the sky:
GIVE RAIN OR THOU SHALT DIE!
And all the five-and-twenty men
Stood waiting on an ancient glen
Until the sky obliged
But, Sir, by then
The ancient glen
Had turned halfway to clay
And Sargeant Loon,
The great buffoon,
Had nothing more to say.

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This is no good
no good at all
I am headed
I am headed for the fall.

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Elizabeth fell
and it was -ell

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Sparrows

They are spare, the sparrows,
Eating nothing for nothing is
Neither here nor there.
They are flightless, born
Of a fragile wing that
May float on water if the
Stars are well aligned.

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Excellent she said
and I forgot the sense
it is wrong the tense
but bowdlerize and all is swell
in this scooper of a town
where all the purple-
headed ladies
hack and smack and spit and frown
to find I cannot spell.

Oh how shall I tell
how far I’ve lost my mind?

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I don’t know many things, like all of Newton’s laws how to mortgage a house the proper way to say good-bye the trick to making immaculate proofs whether I am guileless and if this is bad how to handle the telephone the names of all the songs on the radio that I meant to record in a book of notes how to journal absent pretense how to work in the real world the technique of buffering critics which reactions make household names if I am holding my pencil the goodly way how to whistle like my father when formality is out of place how to heal a cut and even well all-right always what to write.

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A blustery day I walked to town,
Passed the people going by,
Stopped inside an old tea room,
Doffed my hat and hung it high
Upon a molded wooden beam
And nearly hit my head –
Poor luck that I escaped the blow,
I’d rather I were dead.

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Once upon a time there was a small girl with long, brown hair and large, brown eyes and she was the most sensitive little girl this side of the Mississippi. At Christmastime, when her family brought her through the downtown streets to peer in at the city windows, all festooned with lights and garland and cotton snow, she looked long at the tired men on the sidewalk with scraggly hair and nubby coats and she closed her eyes and prayed to God that she would find a penny or a dime as she walked along so that the men would have something to put in their paper cups. And, lo! She always did find a coin or two – lots of people traveled these streets and were too busy to notice the drop of copper at their feet – and