Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/204

With face like pouting gargoyle,
Whose brown eyes shout the things he cannot say:
Explosive evasions;
Fears that cannot escape their torn nakedness;
Renunciations groaning from their dungeons.
He eyes each woman, like a man
Solemnly trying to walk on slippery mud.
Crisp inanities ripple back and forth
Among these three, like feverish parrots
Visiting each other's cages.
She with crazy, violet eyes
Plays with her fork, as though its clink
Rhymed with secret, chained thoughts.
Her struggling, urchin's face
Is split by a voiceless ache.
Stealthily she leans against the man's shoulder,
Her movement like the stifled beginning of light.
She with murder in her eyes
And curtly voluminous body,
Plays her child-role evenly.
She seems a demon underneath
Transparent simpering.
Cringing on the rim of middle-age,
With broken shields piled at her feet,
She has made this man a haunted palace
And she stands before the door
She dare not open, with a dagger
For the woman facing her.

They sit, afterwards, upon the boarding-house porch,
Meekly greeting the velvet swagger of evening—
Woman with crazy, violet eyes;
Woman with frightened murder on her face;
And man like a pouting gargoyle.
And then, like tired children,
Their words grow cool and lazy.
They draw nearer to each ether
And with a trembling curiosity
Look at each other's hands.