Wanderer moon smiling a faintly ironical smile at this brilliant, dew-moistened summer morning,-- a detached sleepily indifferent smile, a wanderer’s smile,-- if I should buy a shirt your color and put on a necktie sky blue where would they carry me? LOVE SONG Sweep the house clean, hang fresh curtains in the windows put on a new dress and come with me! The elm is scattering its little loaves of sweet smells from a white sky! Who shall hear of us in the time to come? Let him say there was a burst of fragrance from black branches. FOREIGN Artsybashev is a Russian. I am an American. Let us wonder, my townspeople, if Artsybashev tends his own fires as I do, gets himself cursed for the baby’s failure to thrive, loosens windows for the woman who cleans his parlor-- or has he neat servants and a quiet library, an intellectual wife perhaps and no children,--an apartment somewhere in a back street or lives alone or with his mother or sister-- I wonder, my townspeople, if Artsybashev looks upon himself the more concernedly or succeeds any better than I in laying the world. I wonder which is the bigger fool in his own mind. These are shining topics my townspeople but-- hardly of great moment. A PRELUDE I know only the bare rocks of today. In these lies my brown sea-weed,-- green quartz veins bent through the wet shale; in these lie my pools left by the tide-- quiet, forgetting waves; on these stiffen white star fish; on these I slip bare footed! Whispers of the fishy air touch my body; “Sisters,” I say to them. HISTORY I. A wind might blow a lotus petal over the pyramids--but not this wind. Summer is a dried leaf. Leaves stir this way then that on the baked asphalt, the wheels of motor cars rush over them,-- gas smells mingle with leaf smells. Oh, Sunday, day of worship!!! The steps to the museum are high. Worshippers pass in and out. Nobody comes here today. I come here to mingle faiance dug from the tomb, turquoise colored necklaces and belched wind from the stomach; delicately veined basins of agate, cracked and discolored and the stink of stale urine! Enter! Elbow in at the door. Men? Women? Simpering, clay fetish-faces counting through the turnstile. Ah! II. This sarcophagus contained the body of Uresh-Nai, priestess to the goddess Mut, Mother of All-- Run your finger against this edge! --here went the chisel!--and think of an arrogance endured six thousand years without a flaw!