1
Per le pillole d’Ercole! I should write a happy poem tonight. It would have to do with a bare, upstanding fellow whose thighs bulge with a zest for—say, a zest! He tries his arm. Flings a stone over the river. Scratches his bare back. Twirls his beard, laughs softly and stretches up his arms in a yawn. —stops in the midst—looking! A white flash over against the oak stems! Draws in his belly. Looks again. In three motions is near the stream’s middle, swinging forward, hugh, hugh, hugh, hugh, blinking his eyes against the lapping wavelets! Out! and the sting of the thicket!
The poet transforms himself into a satyr and goes in pursuit of a white skinned dryad. The gaiety of his mood full of lustihood, even so, turns back with a mocking jibe.
2
Giants in the dirt. The gods, the Greek gods, smothered in filth and ignorance. The race is scattered over the world. Where is its home? Find it if you’ve the genius. Here Hebe with a sick jaw and a cruel husband,—her mother left no place for a brain to grow. Herakles rowing boats on Berry’s Creek! Zeus is a country doctor without a taste for coin jingling. Supper is of a bastard nectar on rare nights for they will come—the rare nights! The ground lifts and out sally the heroes of Sophocles, of Æschylus. They go seeping down into our hearts, they rain upon us and in the bog they sink again down through the white roots, down—to a saloon back of the rail-road switch where they have that girl, you know, the one that should have been Venus by the lust that’s in her. They’ve got her down there among the railroad men. A crusade couldn’t rescue her. Up to jail—or call it down to Limbo—the Chief of Police our Pluto. It’s all of the gods, there’s nothing else worth writing of. They are the same men they always were—but fallen. Do they dance now, they that danced beside Helicon? They dance much as they did then, only, few have an eye for it, through the dirt and fumes.
When they came to question the girl before the local judge it was discovered that there were seventeen men more or less involved so that there was nothing to do but to declare the child a common bastard and send the girl about her business. Her mother took her in and after the brat died of pneumonia a year later she called in the police one day. An officer opened the bedroom door. The girl was in bed with an eighteenth fellow, a young roaming loafer with a silly grin to his face. They forced a marriage which relieved the mother of her burden. The girl was weak minded so that it was only with the greatest difficulty that she could cover her moves, in fact she never could do so with success.
3
Homer sat in a butcher’s shop one rainy night and smelt fresh meat near him so he moved to the open window. It is infinitely important that I do what I well please in the world. What you please is that I please what you please but what I please is well rid of you before I turn off from the path into the field. What I am, why that they made me. What I do, why that I choose for myself. Reading shows, you say. Yes, reading shows reading. What you read is what they think and what they think is twenty years old or twenty thousand and it’s all one to the little girl in the pissoir. Likewise to me. But the butcher was a friendly fellow so he took the carcass outside thinking Homer to be no more than any other beggar.
A man’s carcass has no more distinction than the carcass of an ox.
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