Chapter I: Front Matter

Evelyn Scott

PRECIPITATIONS

1920

The author acknowledges the courtesy of the editors of THE POETRY JOURNAL; OTHERS; THE EGOIST (London); POETRY: A MAGAZINE OF VERSE; PLAYBOY; THE DIAL; THE LIBERATOR; OTHERS: An ANTHOLOGY OF THE NEW VERSE; THE NATION (New York); and THE LYRIC, from all of which poems in this volume have been reprinted.

Contents

Manhattan

The Unpeopled City

Midnight Worship: Brooklyn Bridge
Ascension: Autumn Dusk in Central Park
Startled Forest: Hudson River
Winter Streets
February Springtime
The Assumption of Columbine
From Brooklyn
Snow Dance
Potter's Field
Lights at Night
Midnight

Crowds

Summer Night
New York
Sunset: Battery Park
Crowds
Riots
The City at Night

Vanities

Bread Poems

Lullaby
Embarkation of Cythera
Christian Luxuries
Narrow Flowers
Eyes
After Youth
The Shadow that Walks Alone
Bible Truth
The Maternal Breast
Air for G String
Destiny

The Red Cross

Hectic I-II
Isolation Ward
The Red Cross
Hospital Night

Domestic Canticle

Spring Song
Home Again
To a Sick Child
Love Song
Quarrel
My Child
The Tunnel I-V

Bruised Sunlight

Water Moods

Rain on the Seashore
Ship Masts
Monochrome
Antique
Echo Looks at Herself
Spell

Hungry Seasons

Rainy Twilight
The Storm
Nymphs
Winter Dawn

The Wall of Night

Springtime Too Soon
Stars
Night Music
Nocturne of Water
The Long Moment
Designs I-IV
Argo
Japanese Moon
The Naiad
Floodtide
Mountain Pass in August

Contemporaries

Harmonics

Young Men
Young Girls
House Spirits
At the Meeting House
Christians
Devil's Cradle
Women
Penelope
Poor People's Dreams
For Wives and Mistresses

Portraits

Portrait of Rich Old Lady
Nigger
The Maiden Mother
A Pious Woman
A Very Old Rose Jar
The Nixie
Old Ladies' Valhalla
Portraits of Poets I-III
Theodore Dreiser
Pieta

Brazil Through A Mist

The Ranch

Tropical Life
Twenty-four Hours
Rainy Season
Mail on the Ranch
The Vampire Bat
Conservatism
Little Pigs
The Silly Ewe
The Snake
The Years
Burning Mountains I-III
Tropical Winter
Talk on the Ranch

Les Malades des Pays Chauds

Pride of Race
Don Quixote Sojourns in Rio de Janeiro
Convent Musings
Guitarra
November

The Coming of Christ

The Death of Columbine

Duet
From a Man Dying on a Cross
Lagniappe
Hail Mary!
The Death of Columbine
Pierrot Laughs
The Transmigration of Caliban
Gundry
Viennese Waltz

Resurrection

Immortality
Autumn Night
Venus' Fly Trap
Suicide
Leaves I-IV
Allegro

MANHATTAN

THE UNPEOPLED CITY

MIDNIGHT WORSHIP: BROOKLYN BRIDGE

In the rain
Rows of street lamps are saints in bright garments
That flow long with the bend of knees.
They lift pale heads nimbussed with golden spikes.

Up the lanes of liquid onyx
Toward the high fire-laden altars
Move the saints of Manhattan
In endless pilgrimage to death,
Amidst the asphodel and anemones of dawn.

ASCENSION: AUTUMN DUSK IN CENTRAL PARK

Featureless people glide with dim motion through a quivering
blue silver;
Boats merge with the bronze-gold welters about their keels.
The trees float upward in gray and green flames.
Clouds, swans, boats, trees, all gliding up a hillside
After some gray old women who lift their gaunt forms
From falling shrouds of leaves.

Thin fingered twigs clutch darkly at nothing.
Crackling skeletons shine.
Along the smutted horizon of Fifth Avenue
The hooded houses watch heavily
With oily gold eyes.

STARTLED FORESTS: HUDSON RIVER

The thin hill pushes against the mist.
Its fading defiance sounds in the umber and red of autumn leaves.
Like a dead arm around a warm throat
Is the sagging embrace of the river
Laid grayly about the shore.

The train passes.
We emerge from a tunnel into a sky of thin blue morning glories
Where yellow lily bells tinkle down.
The paths run swiftly away under the lamp glow
Like green and blue lizards
Mottled with light.

WINTER STREETS

The stars, escaping,
Evaporate in acrid mists.
The houses, rearing themselves higher,
Assemble among the clouds.
Night blows through me.
I am clear with its bitterness.
I tinkle along brick canyons
Like a crystal leaf.

FEBRUARY SPRINGTIME

The trees hold out pale gilded branches
Stiff and high in the wind.
On the lawns
Patches of gray-lilac snow
Melt in the hollows of the terraces.
The park is an ocean of fawn-colored plush,
Ridged and faded.
Sharp and delicate,
My shadow moves after me on the rumpled grass--
Grass like a pillow worn by a dear head.
Joy!

THE ASSUMPTION OF COLUMBINE

The lights trickle grayly down from the hoary palisades
And drip into the river.
Leaden reflections flow into the water.
Framed in your window,
Your little face glows deceptively
In a rigid ecstasy,
As the wide-winged morning
Folds back the mist.

FROM BROOKLYN

Along the shore
A black net of branches
Tangles the pulpy yellow lamps.
The shell-colored sky is lustrous with the fading sun.
Across the river Manhattan floats--
Dim gardens of fire--
And rushing invisible toward me through the fog,
A hurricane of faces.

SNOW DANCE

Black brooms of trees sweep the sky clean;
Sweep the house fronts,
And leave them bleak in sleep.
High up the empty moon
Spills her vacuity.

I dance.
My long black shadow

Weaves an invisible pattern of pain.
The snow
Is embroidered with my happiness.

POTTER'S FIELD

Golden petals, honey sweet,
Crushed beneath fear-hastened feet...

Silver paper lanterns glow and shudder
in flat patterns
On a gray eternal face
Stained with pain.

LIGHTS AT NIGHT

In the city,
Storms of light
Surge against the clouds,
Pushing up the darkness.

In the country,
Is the faint pressure of oil lamps,
That sputter,
Smothered with earth--
Extinguished in silence.

MIDNIGHT

The golden snow of the stars
Drifts in mounds of light,
Melts against the hot sides of the city,
Cool cheek against burning breast,
Cold golden snow,
Falling all night.

CROWDS

SUMMER NIGHT

The bloated moon
Has sickly leaves glistening against her
Like flies on a fat white face.

The thick-witted drunkard on the park bench
Touches a girl's breast
That throbs with its own ruthless and stupid delight.
The new-born child crawls in his mother's filth.
Life, the sleep walker,
Lifts toward the skies
An immense gesture of indecency.

NEW YORK

With huge diaphanous feet,
March the leaden velvet elephants,
Pressing the bodies back into the earth.

SUNSET: BATTERY PARK

From cliffs of houses,
Sunlit windows gaze down upon me
Like undeniable eyes,
Millions of bronze eyes,
Unassailable,
Obliterating all they see:
The warm contiguous crowd in the street below
Chills,
Mists,
Drifts past those hungry eyes of Eternity,
Melts seaward and deathward
To the ocean.

CROWDS

The sky along the street a gauzy yellow:
The narrow lights burn tall in the twilight.

The cool air sags,
Heavy with the thickness of bodies.
I am elated with bodies.
They have stolen me from myself.
I love the way they beat me to life,
Pay me for their cruelties.
In the close intimacy I feel for them
There is the indecency I like.

I belong to them,
To these whom I hate;
And because we can never know each other,
Or be anything to each other,
Though we have been the most,
I sell so much of me that could bring a better price.

RIOTS

As if all the birds rushed up in the air,
Fluttering;
Hoots, calls, cries.
I never knew such a monster even in child dreams.

It grows:
Glass smashed;
Stores shut;
Windows tight closed;
Dull, far-off murmurs of voices.

Blood--
The soft, sticky patter of falling drops in the silence.
Everything inundated.
Faces float off in a red dream.
Still the song of the sweet succulent patter.

Blood--
I think it oozes from my finger tips.
--Or maybe it drips from the brow of Jesus.

THE CITY AT NIGHT

Life wriggles in and out
Through the narrow ways
And circuitous passages:
Something monstrous and horrible,
A passion without any master,
Male sexual fluid trickling through the darkness
And setting fire to whatever it touches.

That is the master
Bestowing a casual caress on a slave.
Quiver under it!

VANITIES

BREAD POEMS

LULLABY

I lean my heart against the soft bosomed night:
A white globed breast,
And warm and silent flowing,
The milk of the moon.

EMBARKATION OF CYTHERA

Like jellied flowers
My inflated curves
Melt in the peaceful stagnance of the bath.
If I were to die
I would resist the final agony
With only a faint quiver
From my escaping thighs.

CHRISTIAN LUXURIES

The red fountain of shame gushes up from my heart.
I throw back my long hair and the fountain floats it out
Like a fiery fan.
My wide stretched arms are white coral branches.
The liquid shadows seek between my amber breasts.

But the fire is cool.
It cannot burn me.

NARROW FLOWERS

I am a gray lily.
My roots are deep.
I cannot lift my hands
For one thin yellow butterfly.
Yet last night I grew up to a star.
My shade swirled mistily
Seven mountains high.
I lifted my face to another face.
The moon made a burning shadow on my brow.
Washed by the light,
My sharp breasts silvered.
My dance was an arc of mist
From west to east.

EYES

There are arms of ice around me,
And a hand of ice on my heart.
If they should come to bury me
I would not flinch or start.
For eyes are freezing me--
Eyes too cold for hate.
I think the ground,
Because it is dark,
A warmer place to wait.

AFTER YOUTH

Oh, that mysterious singing sadness of youth!
Exotic colors in the lamplit darkness of wet streets,
Musk and roses in the twilight,
The moon in the park like a golden balloon...

Then to awaken and find the shadows fled,
The music gone...
Empty, bleak!
My soul has grown very small and shriveled in my body.
It no longer looks out.
It rattles around,
And inside my body it begins to look,
Staring all around inside my body,
Like a crab in a crevice,
Staring with bulging eyes
At the strange place in which it finds itself.

THE SHADOW THAT WALKS ALONE

The silence tugs at my breast
With formless lips,
Like a heavy baby,
Attenuates me,
Draws me through myself into it.
I sit in the womb of an idiot,
Helpless before its mouthing tenderness.
The huge flap ears are attentive,
And the soundless face bends toward me
In horrible lovingness.

BIBLE TRUTH

To die...
Oh, cool river!
To float there with nothing to resist--

One ripple of silence spreads out from another.
My spirit widens so,
Circle beyond circle.
I hold up the stars no longer with the pupils of my eyes.
Hands, legs, arms float off from me.
I melt like flakes of snow.

I am no more opposed.
I am no more.

THE MATERNAL BREAST

I walked straight and long,
But I never found you.
I was looking for a hill of a hundred breasts,
A hill modeled after the statues of Diana of the Ephesians.
I was looking for a hill of mounds hairy with grass,
And a place to lie down.

AIR FOR G STRING

White hands of God
With fingers like strong twigs flowering
Rock me in leaves of iron,
Leaves of blue.

Hands of God
Fashioned of clouds
Have finger tips that balance the almond white moon.
The pale sky is a flower
White tipped and pink tipped with dawn.
White hands of God gather the blossoms with fingers that hold me,
Cloud fingers like milk in the azure night,
Weaving strong chords.

DESTINY

I am lost in the vast cave of night.
No sound but the far-off tinkle of stars,
And the cry of a bird
Muffled in shadows.

The light flows in remotely
Through the hollow moon,
Dim strange brilliance
From waters beyond the sky.
Groping,
I listen to the harsh tinkle of the far-off stars,
Feel the clammy shadows about my shoulders.

THE RED CROSS

HECTIC

I

Ruby winged pains flash through me,
Jewel winged agonies:
They vanish,
Carrying me with them
Without my knowing it.