The Man Against the Sky: A Book of Poems

The Poor Relation

     No longer torn by what she knows
     And sees within the eyes of others,
     Her doubts are when the daylight goes,
     Her fears are for the few she bothers.
     She tells them it is wholly wrong
     Of her to stay alive so long;
     And when she smiles her forehead shows
     A crinkle that had been her mother's.

     Beneath her beauty, blanched with pain,
     And wistful yet for being cheated,
     A child would seem to ask again
     A question many times repeated;
     But no rebellion has betrayed
     Her wonder at what she has paid
     For memories that have no stain,
     For triumph born to be defeated.

     To those who come for what she was—
     The few left who know where to find her—
     She clings, for they are all she has;
     And she may smile when they remind her,
     As heretofore, of what they know
     Of roses that are still to blow
     By ways where not so much as grass
     Remains of what she sees behind her.

     They stay a while, and having done
     What penance or the past requires,
     They go, and leave her there alone
     To count her chimneys and her spires.
     Her lip shakes when they go away,
     And yet she would not have them stay;
     She knows as well as anyone
     That Pity, having played, soon tires.

     But one friend always reappears,
     A good ghost, not to be forsaken;
     Whereat she laughs and has no fears
     Of what a ghost may reawaken,
     But welcomes, while she wears and mends
     The poor relation's odds and ends,
     Her truant from a tomb of years—
     Her power of youth so early taken.

     Poor laugh, more slender than her song
     It seems; and there are none to hear it
     With even the stopped ears of the strong
     For breaking heart or broken spirit.
     The friends who clamored for her place,
     And would have scratched her for her face,
     Have lost her laughter for so long
     That none would care enough to fear it.

     None live who need fear anything
     From her, whose losses are their pleasure;
     The plover with a wounded wing
     Stays not the flight that others measure;
     So there she waits, and while she lives,
     And death forgets, and faith forgives,
     Her memories go foraging
     For bits of childhood song they treasure.

     And like a giant harp that hums
     On always, and is always blending
     The coming of what never comes
     With what has past and had an ending,
     The City trembles, throbs, and pounds
     Outside, and through a thousand sounds
     The small intolerable drums
     Of Time are like slow drops descending.

     Bereft enough to shame a sage
     And given little to long sighing,
     With no illusion to assuage
     The lonely changelessness of dying,—
     Unsought, unthought-of, and unheard,
     She sings and watches like a bird,
     Safe in a comfortable cage
     From which there will be no more flying.