Ollie McGee

    I have seen many faces changed by the Sculptor Death,
    But never a face like Harold's who passed in a throe of pain.
    There were maidens and youths in the bud, and men in the lust of life;
    And women whom child-birth racked till the crying soul slipped through;
    Patriarchs withered with age and nuns ascetical white;
    And one who wasted her virgin wealth in a riot of joy.
    Brothers and sisters at last in a quiet and purple pall,
    Fellow voyagers bound to a port on an ash-blue sea,
    Locked in an utterless grief, in a mystery fearful to dream.
    All of these I have seen, but the face of Harold the bold
    Looked with a penitent pallor and stared with a sad surprise.

    For now at last he was still who never knew rest in life.
    And the ardent ...

    When my moustache curled,
    And my hair was black,
    And I wore tight trousers
    And a diamond stud,
    I was an excellent knave of hearts and took many a trick.
    But when the gray hairs began to appear -
    Lo! a new generation of girls
    Laughed at me, not fearing me,
    And I had no more exciting adventures
    Wherein I was all but shot for a heartless devil,
    But only drabby affairs, warmed-over affairs
    Of other days and other men.
    And time went on until I lived at
    Mayer's restaurant,
    Partaking of short-orders, a gray, untidy,
    Toothless, discarded, rural Don Juan. . . .
    There is a mighty shade here who sings
    Of one named Beatrice;
    And I see now that the force that made him great
    Drove...

    She took my strength by minutes,
    She took my life by hours,
    She drained me like a fevered moon
    That saps the spinning world.
    The days went by like shadows,
    The minutes wheeled like stars.
    She took the pity from my heart,
    And made it into smiles.
    She was a hunk of sculptor's clay,
    My secret thoughts were fingers:
    They flew behind her pensive brow
    And lined it deep with pain.
    They set the lips, and sagged the cheeks,
    And drooped the eye with sorrow.
    My soul had entered in the clay,
    Fighting like seven devils.
    It was not mine, it was not hers;
    She held it, but its struggles
    Modeled a face she hated,
    And a face I feared to see.
    I beat the windows, shook the bolt...

    I went up and down the streets
    Here and there by day and night,
    Through all hours of the night caring for the poor who were sick.
    Do you know why?
    My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs.
    And I turned to the people and poured out my love to them.
    Sweet it was to see the crowds about the lawns on the day of my funeral,
    And hear them murmur their love and sorrow.
    But oh, dear God, my soul trembled, scarcely able
    To hold to the railing of the new life
    When I saw Em Stanton behind the oak tree
    At the grave,
    Hiding herself, and her grief!

    I am Minerva, the village poetess,
    Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
    For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
    And all the more when "Butch" Weldy
    Captured me after a brutal hunt.
    He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
    And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
    Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
    Will some one go to the village newspaper,
    And gather into a book the verses I wrote? -
    I thirsted so for love
    I hungered so for life!

    You would not believe, would you
    That I came from good Welsh stock?
    That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?
    And of more direct lineage than the
    New Englanders And Virginians of Spoon River?
    You would not believe that I had been to school
    And read some books.
    You saw me only as a run-down man
    With matted hair and beard
    And ragged clothes.
    Sometimes a man's life turns into a cancer
    From being bruised and continually bruised,
    And swells into a purplish mass
    Like growths on stalks of corn.
    Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life
    Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow,
    With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter,
    Whom you tormented and drove to deat...