Black Beetles in Amber

Of reputations margining thy way,
Nor wander from the path new truth to slay.
Tell to thyself whatever lies thou wilt,
Catch as thou canst at pennies got by guilt—
Straight down to death this blessed year thou'lt sink,
Thy life washed out as with a wave of ink.
But if this prophecy be not fulfilled,
And thou who killest patience be not killed;
If age assail in vain and vice attack
Only by folly to be beaten back;
Yet Nature can this consolation give:
The rogues who die not are condemned to live!

THE RETROSPECTIVE BIRD

His caw is a cackle, his eye is dim,
And he mopes all day on the lowest limb;
Not a word says he, but he snaps his bill
And twitches his palsied head, as a quill,
The ultimate plume of his pride and hope,
Quits his now featherless nose-of-the-Pope,
Leaving that eminence brown and bare
Exposed to the Prince of the Power of the Air.
And he sits and he thinks: 'I'm an old, old man,
Mateless and chickless, the last of my clan,
But I'd give the half of the days gone by
To perch once more on the branches high,
And hear my great-grand-daddy's comical croaks
In authorized versions of Bulletin jokes.'

THE OAKLAND DOG

I lay one happy night in bed
And dreamed that all the dogs were dead.
They'd all been taken out and shot—
Their bodies strewed each vacant lot.
O'er all the earth, from Berkeley down
To San Leandro's ancient town,
And out in space as far as Niles—
I saw their mortal parts in piles.
One stack upreared its ridge so high
Against the azure of the sky
That some good soul, with pious views,
Put up a steeple and sold pews.
No wagging tail the scene relieved:
I never in my life conceived
(I swear it on the Decalogue!)
Such penury of living dog.
The barking and the howling stilled,
The snarling with the snarler killed,
All nature seemed to hold its breath:
The silence was as deep as death.
True, candidates were all in roar
On every platform, as before;
And villains, as before, felt free
To finger the calliope.
True, the Salvationist by night,
And milkman in the early light,
The lonely flutist and the mill
Performed their functions with a will.
True, church bells on a Sunday rang
The sick man's curtain down—the bang
Of trains, contesting for the track,
Out of the shadow called him back.
True, cocks, at all unheavenly hours,
Crew with excruciating powers,
Cats on the woodshed rang and roared,
Fat citizens and fog-horns snored.
But this was all too fine for ears
Accustomed, through the awful years,
To the nocturnal monologues
And day debates of Oakland dogs.
And so the world was silent. Now
What else befell—to whom and how?
Imprimis, then, there were no fleas,
And days of worth brought nights of ease.
Men walked about without the dread
Of being torn to many a shred,
Each fragment holding half a cruse
Of hydrophobia's quickening juice.
They had not to propitiate
Some curst kioodle at each gate,
But entered one another's grounds,
Unscared, and were not fed to hounds.
Women could drive and not a pup
Would lift the horse's tendons up
And let them go—to interject