We find an incredulous pleasure In changing from violent influences To breath that is mutilated with outlines. With a subtle suspicion, we greet The tiny fables of our hands and feet. We take the little blindness of eyes To reassure ourselves That the fables will not vanish. Humorously we trade Languages, like one who gives a plateau For a drop of old liquor! _Second Spirit_ Once we were germs of thought Squirming under elastic disguises-- The bank-clerk inscribing tombstones; The poet playing surgeon to his heart; The cardinal starving his flesh. Our bodies were images made by thought And symbolizing the pain of its birth. Murder, love, and theft Were only struggling experiments Made by germs of thought emerging to form. _Third Spirit_ What men call mysticism Is the lull in which their germ Of thought compensates itself By dreaming of a future form. But when the struggle is resumed, It often derides its inactivity, Scorning the brilliant trance of its exhaustion! _First Spirit_ And now, three tired spirits, Seeking a weird trinket of the past, Have slipped into a replica of birth. _Second Spirit_ Because the gliding search of our life Is lacking in one quality, amusement, We shall often return To evenings, men, and walls of stone. INSANITY Geroid Latour was a lean, grandiose Frenchman whose curly beard resembled a cluster of ripe raspberries. His lips were maroon-colored and slightly distended, as though forever slyly inviting some stubbornly inarticulate thought--as though slyly inviting Geroid Latour. A man’s lips and beard are two-thirds of his being, unless he is an anchorite, and even in that case they can become impressively stunted. Geroid Latour was an angel rolling in red mud. From much rolling he had acquired the pert, raspberry beard, struggling lips, and the surreptitious grandeur of a nose, but the plastic grin of a singed angel sometimes listened to his face. His wife, having futilely tried to wrench his beard off, sought to reach his eyes with a hat-pin. “This is unnecessary,” he expostulated. “Another woman once did it much better with a word.” A plum-colored parrot in the room shrieked: “I am dumb! I am dumb!” Geroid Latour had painted it once, in a sober moment. Geroid and his wife wept over the parrot; slapped each other regretfully; and sat down to eat a pear. A little girl ran into the room. Her face was like a candied moon. “My mother has died and my father wants a coffin,” she said. Geroid Latour rubbed his hands into a perpendicular lustre--he was a facetiously candid undertaker. He took the hand of the little girl whose face was like a candied moon and they ambled down the street.