COLLECTED POEMS
I do not know that I can say just why,
But I felt the feathery touch of something wrong:
"Since last I wrote—and I fear weeks have gone
Too far for me to leave my gratitude
TInuttered for its own acknowledgment
I have won, without the magic of Amphion
Without the songs of Orpheus or Apollo,
The frank regard and with it, if you like,
The fledged respect of three quick-footed friends.
('Nothing is there more marvelous than man,'
Said Sophocles; and I say after him:
He traps and captures, all-inventive one,
The light birds and the creatures of the wold,
And in his nets the fishes of the sea.')
Once they were pictures, painted on the air,
Faint with eternal color, colorless,—
But now they are not pictures, they are fowls.
"At first they stood aloof and cocked their small,
Smooth, prudent heads at me and made as if,
With a cryptic idiotic melancholy,
To look authoritative and sagacious;
But when I tossed a piece of apple to them,
They scattered back with a discord of short squawks
And then came forward with a craftiness
That made me think of Eden. Atropos
Came first, and having grabbed the morsel up,
Ran flapping far away and out of sight,
With Clotho and Lachesis hard after her;
But finally the three fared all alike,
And next day I persuaded them with corn.
In a week they came and had it from my fingers
And looked up at me while I pinched their bills
And made them sneeze. Count Pretzel's Carmichael
140
