Of bronze cooled under a ripple, marked by that flowing.
It was not slight but it could not weight her down.
Her hands and feet were well made and her body had
That effortless ease, that blood that flies with the bird.
She saw his open eyes and came over to him,
Not shyly but not concernedly. Their eyes met.
The older woman kept stirring her melted world.
“Well,” said the girl, “You look better.” He nodded, “Yes.”
Their eyes said, “I have seen a new thing. In the deep cells
Below the paltry clockwork of the ticked heart,
I have seen something neither light nor night,
A new thing, a new picture. It may mean
The lifting of a shut latch. It may mean nothing.”
She made an escaping gesture with her right hand.
“You didn’t say who you were,” she said. “You just fell.
You better tell who you are, Pop’ll want to know.”
A shadow crossed her. “Pop won’t want to keep you,” she said.
“But I reckon we’ll have to keep you here for a piece,
You’re not fit to travel yet and that’s a fact.
You look a little bit like Young Seward,” she said
Reflectively, “But sometimes you look more like Oliver.
I dunno. What’s your name?” Ellyat put forth his hand
Toward being alive again, slowly, hauling it down.
He remembered. He was Jack Ellyat. He had been lost.
He had lain with hel-shoes on in Nibelung Hall
For twenty years. This was the girl with the swine
Whose loud sweet calling had come to him in the wood
And lifted him back to warmth and a cooking world.
He had lost a piece of himself, a piece of life,
He must find it, but now— “What’s your name?” he said in a whisper.
This is the hidden place that hiders know.
This is where hiders go.
Step softly, the snow that falls here is different snow,
The rain has a different sting.
Step softly, step like a cloud, step softly as the least
Whisper of air against the beating wing,
And let your eyes be sealed
With two blue muscadines
Stolen from secret vines,
Or you will never find in the lost field
The table spread, the signs of the hidden feast.
This is where hiders live.
This is the tentative
And outcast corner where hiders steal away
To bake their hedgehogs in a lump of clay,
To raise their crops and children wild and shy,
And let the world go by
In accidental marches of armed wrath
That stumble blindly past the buried path.
Step softly, step like a whisper, but do not speak
Or you will never see
The furriness curled within the hollow tree,
The shadow-dance upon the wilderness-creek.
This is the hiders’ house.
This is the ark of pine-and-willow-boughs.
This is the quiet place.
You may call now, but let your call be sweet
As clover-honey strained through silver sieves
And delicate as the dust upon the moth
Or you will never find your fugitives.
Call once, and call again,
Then, if the lifted strain
Has the true color and substance of the wild,
You may perceive, if you have lucky eyes,
Something that ran away from being wise
And changed silk ribbons for a greener cloth,
Some budding-horned and deer-milk-suckled child
Some lightness, moving toward you on light feet,
Some girl with indolent passion in her face.
Jack Ellyat wondered about things, six days later.
The world had come back to its shape. He was well and strong.
He had seen the old man with the burnt dreams in his eyes,
Who had fallen from something years ago in his youth
Or risen from something with an effort too stark;
The runaway who had broken the pasture-bars
To test the figments of life on a wild stone.
You could see the ultimate hardness of that strange stone
Cut in his face—but then, there was something else,
That came at moments and went, and answered no questions.
Had the feel of the stone been worth it, after all?
It puzzled Ellyat. He couldn’t figure it out.
Going West to get fat acres was common enough,
But, once you got the acres, you settled down,
You sent your children to school. You put up a fence.
When a war came along, you fought on your proper side;
You didn’t blast both sides with Mercutio’s curse
And hide in a wilderness. The man was all wrong,
And yet the man was not weak. It was very strange.
If the man had been weak, you could understand him all right.
The woman was more easy to understand.
He liked the woman—he liked the rough shaggy boy
Who had lived so much in the woods to keep from the armies
That his ears were sharp as a squirrel’s, and all his movements
Had something untamed about them, something leafy and strange.
Of course he ought to be fighting for the North,
He was really a skulk—but things were different here.
You couldn’t reason about the difference in words
But you felt it inside your skin. Things were different here.
Like Nibelung Hall in the rain of his fever-dream,
But with no terror, with an indolent peace.
He’d have to get back to the regiment pretty soon.
He couldn’t stay here. They none of them wanted him here.
He’d have to get back. But he didn’t know where to go.
They could tell him how to get back to Pittsburg Landing
But how did he know if the army was there or not?
He didn’t even know who’d won in the battle,
And, if the Rebs had won, he’d be captured again
As soon as he got on a road. Well, he’d have to chance it.
He couldn’t stay here and fall in love with Melora.
Melora came walking down the crooked path
With a long shadow before her. It was the hour
When the heat is out of the gold of afternoon
And the cooled gold has not yet turned into grey,
The hour of the paused tide, neither flow nor ebb,
The flower beginning to close but not yet closed.
He saw her carry her fairy head aloft
Against that descending gold,
He saw the long shadow that her slight body made.
When she came near enough to him, she heard him humming
A tune he had thought forgotten, the weaver’s tune.
“And the only harm that I’ve ever done,
Was to love a pretty maid.”
She halted, trying to listen. He stopped the tune.
“What’s that you were singing?” she said. “Oh, just trash,” he said.
“I liked it. Sing it some more.” But he would not sing it.
They regarded
