The cemetery was a smile of lawn in which the monuments stood like polished teeth. All of the countryside was a response in laughter to the frolicsome couple of the sun and sky. We stood beside the Minister. The marble vault opened its bronze grille and as the coffins slid into their place, a Christian word nodded the act to gayety. Were not the coffins polished? Was not the vault a little elegant smile echoing the brash laughter of the skies? And the solemnity of the group who with bared heads watched the bodies of my parents slide away, was it not thrust across the wanton mood of the morning like a comic strip? Eyes dwelt a moment upon me and read there the conventional bereavement. A subtle counterpoint stirred underneath the elemental laughter. All of us seemed little whirls of dust modeled by a momentary wind: pompously we were acting our droll scene for the gods whose straighter moods shone in the sun and the earth, and who used us for their more intricate and secret humors. I have lost my mother and my father. How, here, in this laughing farce of Spring, can I dwell with my sorrow? Here all of us are dwarfed too cruelly. Almost, I expected as we walked away, to see the Minister fling off his mask and motley, to see the mourners caper in relief as at a curtain’s drop: see all of us and the dead bodies of my parents, too, and their so polished coffins, take on the ease of supers when the show is done: pocket their pay and pass.... From the east, a cloud, swollen and purple, voyages upon the sun. The earth shudders as the sun is shut out, and like a festooned ship upon a mournful sea it founders. Moving toward home, I move in a dark element, and it has swallowed all the laughing world. This lawn is a breast of decomposing flesh. The stones of the city are death substantiate, feeding upon the drab-clothed men and women who weave within and without in wistful struggle to escape. Upon my window-sill where Spring sat and pelted me with flowers, an empty breath breathes emptiness.... The true stuff of space in which our cosmos flickers like a fly in a night of storm? * * * * * I am on my couch. --Oh, there must be a truth to salvage me from chaos. Life is a whirlwind? Let the Lord which is Truth speak to me then from His whirlwind. _c_ Three weeks I lie on my couch and am alone. Three weeks of travail and unceasing night. And at the three weeks’ end, an infant birth of truth so frail and so nostalgic of its womb that it scarce wills to breathe, and every hour I must nurse it forward lest it lapse back into the sweet Abyss. The travail has its own life. When it is done, there is the babe of a truth. And yet how are they joined, this deep volumnear anguish and this green sprout rising after? My travail is an earth: and from its dark and secret brood springs a light shoot of knowing....