So We Grew Together

        Reading over your letters I find you wrote me
    "My dear boy," or at times "dear boy," and the envelope
    Said "master" - all as I had been your very son,
    And not the orphan whom you adopted.
    Well, you were father to me! And I can recall
    The things you did for me or gave me:
    One time we rode in a box car to Springfield
    To see the greatest show on earth;
    And one time you gave me redtop boots,
    And one time a watch, and one time a gun.
    Well, I grew to gawkiness with a voice
    Like a rooster trying to crow in August
    Hatched in April, we'll say.
    And you went about wrapped up in silence
    With eyes aflame, and I heard little rumors
    Of what they were doing to you, and how
    They wronged you - and we were poor - so poor!
    And I could not understand why you failed,
    And why if you did good things for the people
    The people did not sustain you.
    And why you loved another woman than Aunt Susan,
    So it was whispered at school, and what could be baser,
    Or so little to be forgiven?...

    They crowded you hard in those days.
    But you fought like a wounded lion
    For yourself I know, but for us, for me.
    At last you fell ill, and for months you tottered
    Around the streets as thin as death,
    Trying to earn our bread, your great eyes glowing
    And the silence around you like a shawl!
    But something in you kept you up.
    You grew well again and rosy with cheeks
    Like an Indian peach almost, and eyes
    Full of moonlight and sunlight, and a voice
    That sang, and a humor that warded
    The arrows off. But still between us
    There was reticence; you kept me away
    With a glittering hardness; perhaps you thought
    I kept you away - for I was moving
    In spheres you knew not, living through
    Beliefs you believed in no more, and ideals
    That were just mirrors of unrealities.
    As a boy can be I was critical of you.
    And reasons for your failures began to arise
    In my mind - I saw specific facts here and there
    With no philosophy at hand to weld them
    And synthesize them into one truth -
    And a rush of the strength of youth
    Deluded me into thinking the world
    Was something so easily understood and managed
    While I knew it not at all in truth.
    And an adolescent egotism
    Made me feel you did not know me
    Or comprehend the all that I was.
    All this you divined....

        So it went. And when I left you and passed
    To the world, the city - still I see you
    With eyes averted, and feel your hand
    Limp with sorrow - you could not speak.
    You thought of what I might be, and where
    Life would take me, and how it would end -
    There was longer silence. A year or two
    Brought me closer to you. I saw the play now
    And the game somewhat and understood your fights
    And enmities, and hardnesses and silences,
    And wild humor that had kept you whole -
    For your soul had made it as an antitoxin
    To the world's infections. And you swung to me
    Closer than before - and a chumship began
    Between us....

        What vital power was yours!
    You never tired, or needed sleep, or had a pain,
    Or refused a delight. I loved the things now
    You had always loved, a winning horse,
    A roulette wheel, a contest of skill
    In games or sports ... long talks on the corner
    With men who have lived and tell you
    Things with a rich flavor of old wisdom or humor;
    A woman, a glass of whisky at a table
    Where the fatigue of life falls, and our reserves
    That wait for happiness come up in smiles,
    Laughter, gentle confidences. Here you were
    A man with youth, and I a youth was a man,
    Exulting in your braveries and delight in life.
    How you knocked that scamp over at Harry Varnell's
    When he tried to take your chips! And how I,
    Who had thought the devil in cards as a boy,
    Loved to play with you now and watch you play;
    And watch the subtle mathematics of your mind
    Prophecy, divine the plays. Who was it
    In your ancestry that you harked back to
    And reproduced with such various gifts
    Of flesh and spirit, Anglo-Saxon, Celt? -
    You with such rapid wit and powerful skill
    For catching illogic and whipping Error's
    Fangéd head from the body?...

        I was really ahead of you
    At this stage, with more self-consciousness
    Of what man is, and what life is at last,
    And how the spirit works, and by what laws,
    With what inevitable force. But still I was
    Behind you in that strength which in our youth,
    If ever we have it, squeezes all the nectar
    From the grapes. It seemed you'd never lose
    This power and sense of joy, but yet at times
    I saw another phase of you....

    There was the day
    We rode together north of the old town,
    Past the old farm houses that I knew -
    Past maple groves, and fields of corn in the shock,
    And fields of wheat with the fall green.
    It was October, but the clouds were summer's,
    Lazily floating in a sky of June;
    And a few crows flying here and there,
    And a quail's call, and around us a great silence
    That held at its core old memories
    Of pioneers, and dead days, forgotten things!
    I'll never forget how you looked that day. Your hair
    Was turning silver now, but still your eyes
    Burned as of old, and the rich olive glow
    In your cheeks shone, with not a line or wrinkle! -
    You seemed to me perfection - a youth, a man!
    And now you talked of the world with the old wit,
    And now of the soul - how such a man went down
    Through folly or wrong done by him, and how
    Man's death cannot end all,
    There must be life hereafter!...

    As you were that day, as you looked and spoke,
    As the earth was, I hear as the soul of it all
    Godard's Dawn, Dvorák's Humoresque,
    The Morris Dances, Mendelssohn's Barcarole,
    And old Scotch songs, When the Kye Come Hame,
    And The Moon Had Climbed the Highest Hill,
    The Musseta Waltz and Rudolph's Narrative;
    Your great brow seemed Beethoven's
    And the lust of life in your face Cellini's,
    And your riotous fancy like Dumas.
    I was nearer you now than ever before,
    And finding each other thus I see to-day
    How the human soul seeks the human soul
    And finds the one it seeks at last.
    For you know you can open a window
    That looks upon embowered darkness,
    When the flowers sleep and the trees are still
    At Midnight, and no light burns in the room;
    And you can hide your butterfly
    Somewhere in the room, but soon you will see
    A host of butterfly mates
    Fluttering through the window to join
    Your butterfly hid in the room.
    It is somehow thus with souls....

    This day then I understood it all:
    Your vital democracy and love of men
    And tolerance of life; and how the excess of these
    Had wrought your sorrows in the days
    When we were so poor, and the small of mind
    Spoke of your sins and your connivance
    With sinful men. You had lived it down,
    Had triumphed over them, and you had grown.
    Prosperous in the world and had passed
    Into an easy mastery of life and beyond the thought
    Of further conquests for things.
    As the Brahmins say, no more you worshiped matter,
    Or scarcely ghosts, or even the gods
    With singleness of heart.
    This day you worshiped Eternal Peace
    Or Eternal Flame, with scarce a laugh or jest
    To hide your worship; and I understood,
    Seeing so many facets to you, why it was
    Blind Condon always smiled to hear your voice,
    And why it was in a greenroom years ago
    Booth turned to you, marking your face
    From all the rest, and said, "There is a man
    Who might play Hamlet - better still Othello";
    And why it was the women loved you; and the priest
    Could feed his body and soul together drinking
    A glass of beer and visiting with you....

    Then something happened:
    Your face grew smaller, your brow more narrow,
    Dull fires burned in your eyes,
    Your body shriveled, you walked with a cynical shuffle,
    Your hands mixed the keys of life,
    You had become a discord.
    A monstrous hatred consumed you -
    You had suffered the greatest wrong of all,
    I knew and granted the wrong.
    You had mounted up to sixty years, now breathing hard,
    And just at the time that honor belonged to you
    You were dishonored at the hands of a friend.
    I wept for you, and still I wondered
    If all I had grown to see in you and find in you
    And love in you was just a fond illusion -
    If after all I had not seen you aright as a boy:
    Barbaric, hard, suspicious, cruel, redeemed
    Alone by bubbling animal spirits -
    Even these gone now, all of you smoke
    Laden with stinging gas and lethal vapor....
    Then you came forth again like the sun after storm -
    The deadly uric acid driven out at last
    Which had poisoned you and dwarfed your soul -
    So much for soul!

    The last time I saw you
    Your face was full of golden light,
    Something between flame and the richness of flesh.
    You were yourself again, wholly yourself.
    And oh, to find you again and resume
    Our understanding we had worked so long to reach -
    You calm and luminant and rich in thought!
    This time it seemed we said but "yes" or "no" -
    That was enough; we smoked together
    And drank a glass of wine and watched
    The leaves fall sitting on the porch....
    Then life whirled me away like a leaf,
    And I went about the crowded ways of New York.

    And one night Alberta and I took dinner
    At a place near Fourteenth Street where the music
    Was like the sun on a breeze-swept lake
    When every wave is a patine of fire,
    And I thought of you not at all
    Looking at Alberta and watching her white teeth
    Bite off bits of Italian bread,
    And watching her smile and the wide pupils
    Of her eyes, electrified by wine
    And music and the touch of our hands
    Now and then across the table.
    We went to her house at last.
    And through a languorous evening.
    Where no light was but a single candle,
    We circled about and about a pending theme
    Till at last we solved it suddenly in rapture
    Almost by chance; and when I left
    She followed me to the hall and leaned above
    The railing about the stair for the farewell kiss -
    And I went into the open air ecstatically,
    With the stars in the spaces of sky between
    The towering buildings, and the rush
    Of wheels and clang of bells,
    Still with the fragrance of her lips and cheeks
    And glinting hair about me, delicate
    And keen in spite of the open air.
    And just as I entered the brilliant car
    Something said to me you are dead -
    I had not thought of you, was not thinking of you.
    But I knew it was true, as it was,
    For the telegram waited me at my room....
        I didn't come back.
    I could not bear to see the breathless breath
    Over your brow - nor look at your face -
    However you fared or where
    To what victories soever -
    Vanquished or seemingly vanquished!