--I shut my eyes in my hands and you are about me, my Baby. I am a baby with you. Our flesh is one: our hands are one like petals entwined in a flower. We are a flower together. We spring from the black earth. We have had our blooming. The earth is there, we are gone. In the black earth under the snows, there is a seed of us, my darling. I am the seed of us, Edith!... of our softness, of the bright bloom of our twined petals the hard seed. I am lain away in the earth. The earth blooms only in us. --Flint-hard room buried beneath the City, You case me, I shall burst you yet! Buried within you, tight sealed room, Buried within me, within your bitter coldness.... The folded memory of a flower. * * * * * --Cracks in the leaping ramparts of New York. And I look down in them. I am a girl with short black hair and hands that are strong. I peer down on my knees at the fissures of New York. I kick my slippered feet behind me, peering down. My legs are solid in their white silk stockings and when I toss my slippers Jack and Harry see my legs to the knees: good legs: their eyes are bright, looking, they swallow thick.... I look down into the heart-beat of the City. --I am not hungry. Look at me, Fan, look at me huddling to-night around an oil stove and a lamp, both on the floor and myself on the floor. Black dress, grey frayed coat ... my hair is down to keep my throat warm. The wind is a solid wall of ice against my window: a Devil sucks it back, it plunges again ... solid steel wall ... and splinters of it cut through the glass and the bricks, cut to my shoulders huddled over the oil stove and the lamp. --They smell. Hot smell that gets cold beyond my shoulders. There in the corner, where the bed is, where the washstand, is the smell of the oil stove and the lamp, but cold. Here it is hot. I could singe my eyebrows.... It is the style to singe one’s eyebrows ... or cut them or something. How do they do it, those sharp pencil-lines over eyes? The smell is cold by the mirror ... I stay huddled. But do you think all the ladies with red cheeks and penciled brows and eye fire-dried ... are they walking Broadway to-night?... have got so by huddling like me too close over a stove and a lamp? --In the rest of the house it is quiet and asleep. The wall of ice plunges against my room. My room alone. I am not hungry. To-morrow I have a job so I cannot be hungry. Lamp and stove, tell me, are you burning my cheeks red too?... are you going to singe my eyebrows? are you going to sear my eyes? --New York! New York! why am I here, frozen and empty in your leaping arms, peering into your bowels? Women with burnt faces walk your streets. Women wander like dreams denied through your pent streets. There are in New York men and women who worship God. Christians only, Jews only. Worshipers, only of God. Are you New York, you worshipers of God? Have you made this? Has your God let you make this?