Their shadows blotted together into one shadow.
She put her hand to both cheeks, and touched them lightly,
As if to cool them from something. A soft, smooth shock
Inexplicable as the birth of a star
And terrible as the last cry of the flesh
Ran through his cords and struck. He stared at the shadows.
Then she took her shadow into the house with her
But he still stood looking where the shadows had touched.
John Vilas watched them go off through the wood
To get the water from the other spring,
The big pail clanking between them. His hard mouth
Was wry with an old nursery-rhyme, but his eyes
Looked somewhere beyond hardness. Let them go.
Harriet said and Harriet always said
And Harriet was right, but let them go.
Men who go looking for the wilderness-stone
And find it, should not marry or beget,
But, having done so, they must take the odds
As the odds are. Faustus and I are old.
We creep about among the hollow trees
Where the bright devils of our youth have gone
Like a dissolving magic, back to earth.
But in our tarnished and our antique wands
And in the rusty metal of our spells
There still remain such stubbornness and pith
As may express elixirs from a rock
Or pick a further quarrel with the gods
Should we find cause enough. I know this girl,
This boy, this youth, this honey in the blood,
This kingly danger, this immediate fire.
I know what comes of it and how it lies
And how, long afterwards, at the split core
Of the prodigious and self-eaten lie,
A little grain of truth lies undissolved
By all the acids of philosophy.
Therefore, I will not seek a remedy
Against a sword but in the sword itself
Nor medicine life with anything but life.
I am too old to try the peddler’s tricks,
Too wise, too foolish, too long strayed in the wood,
The custom of the world is not my custom,
Nor its employments mine. I know this girl
As well as if I never lay with her mother.
I know her heart touched with that wilderness-stone
That turns good money into heaps of leaves
And builds an outcast house of apple-twigs
Beside a stream that never had a name.
She will forget what I cannot forget,
And she may learn what I shall never learn,
But, while the wilderness-stone is strong in her,
I’d have her use it for a touchstone yet
And see the double face called good and bad
With her own eyes. So, if she stares it down,
She is released, and if it conquers her,
She was not weighted with a borrowed shield.
We are no chafferers, my daughter and I.
We give what pleases us and when we choose,
And, having given, we do not take back.
But once we shut our fists upon a star
It will take portents to unloose that grip
And even then the stuff will keep the print.
It is a habit of living. For the boy
I do not know but will not stand between.
He has more toughness in him than he thinks.
—I took my wife out of a pretty house.
—I took my wife out of a pleasant place.
—I stripped my wife of comfortable things.
—I drove my wife to wander with the wind.
—And we are old now, Faustus. Let it be so.
There was one man who might have understood,
Because he was half-oriole and half-fox,
Not Emerson, but the man by Walden Pond.
But he was given to the birds in youth
And never had a woman or a daughter.
The filled pail stood on a stone by the lip of the spring,
But they had forgotten the pail. The spring was a cool
Wavering mirror that showed them their white, blurred faces
And made them wonder to see the faces so like
And yet so silent and distant. Melora turned.
“We ought to go back,” she said in a commonplace voice.
“Not yet, Melora.” Something, as from the spring
Rising, in silver smoke, in arras of silvers,
Drifting around them, pushed by a light, slow wind.
“Not yet Melora.” They sat on a log above.
Melora’s eyes were still looking down at the spring.
Her knees were hunched in her arms. “You’ll be going,” she said,
Staring at the dimmed glass. “You’ll be going soon.”
The silver came closer, soaking into his body,
Soaking his flesh with bright, impalpable dust.
He could smell her hair. It smelt of leaves and the wind.
He could smell the untaken whiteness of her clean flesh,
The deep, implacable fragrance, fiercer than sleep,
Sweeter than long sleep in the sun. He touched her shoulder.
She let the hand stay but still she gazed at the spring.
Then, after a while, she turned. The mirrored mouths
Fused in one mouth that trembled with the slow waters.
Melora, in the room she had to herself
Because they weren’t white-trash and used to be Eastern,
Let the rain of her hair fall down,
In a stream, in a flood, on the white birch of her body.
She was changed, then. She was not a girl any more.
She was the white heart of the birch,
Half hidden by a fleece that a South wind spun
Out of bronze air and light, on a wheel of light.
Her sharp clear breasts
Were two young victories in the hollow darkness
And when she stretched her hands above her head
And let the spun fleece ripple to her loins,
Her body glowed like deep springs under the sun.
She had no song to sing herself asleep
Tonight, but she would need no song to sing.
A thousand thoughts ran past her in a brief
Unhurrying minute, on small, quiet feet
But did not change her. Nothing could change her now.
—Black winter night against the windowpane
And she, a child, singing her fear to sleep
With nursery-rhymes and broken scraps of tunes.
How well she could remember those old songs.
But this night she would sleep without a song
Except the song the earth knows in the night
After the huge embrace of the bright day,
And that was better. She thought to herself.
“I don’t know. I can’t think. I ought to be scared.
I ought to have lots of maybes. I can’t find them.
It’s funny. It’s different. It’s a big pair of hands
Pushing you somewhere—but you’ve got to go.
Maybe you’re crazy but you’ve got to go.
That’s why Mom went. I know about Mom now.
I know how she used to be. It’s pretty sweet.
It’s rhymes, it’s hurting, it’s feeling a
