Pulvis et Umbra
There is dust upon my fingers,
Pale gray dust of beaten wings,
Where a great moth came and settled
From the night’s blown winnowings.
Harvest with her low red planets
Wheeling over Arrochar;
And the lonely hopeless calling
Of the bell-buoy on the bar,
Where the sea with her old secret
Moves in sleep and cannot rest.
From that dark beyond my doorway,
Silent the unbidden guest
Came and tarried, fearless, gentle,
Vagrant of the starlit gloom,
One frail waif of beauty fronting
Immortality and doom;
Through the chambers of the twilight
Roaming from the vast outland,
Resting for a thousand heart-beats
In the hollow of my hand.
“Did the volley of a thrush-song
Lodge among some leaves and dew
Hillward, then across the gloaming
This dark mottled thing was you?
“Or is my mute guest whose coming
So unheralded befell
From the border wilds of dreamland,
Only whimsy Ariel,
“Gleaning with the wind, in furrows
Lonelier than dawn to reap,
Dust and shadow and forgetting,
Frost and reverie and sleep?
“In the hush when Cleopatra
Felt the darkness reel and cease,
Was thy soul a wan blue lotus
Laid upon her lips for peace?
“And through all the years that wayward
Passion in one mortal breath,
Making thee a thing of silence,
Made thee as the lords of death?
“Or did goblin men contrive thee
In the forges of the hills
Out of thistle-drift and sundown
Lost amid their tawny rills,
“Every atom on their anvil
Beaten fine and bolted home,
Every quiver wrought to cadence
From the rapture of a gnome?
“Then the lonely mountain wood-wind,
Straying up from dale to dale,
Gave thee spirit, free forever,
Thou immortal and so frail!
“Surely thou art not that sun-bright
Psyche, hoar with age, and hurled
On the northern shore of Lethe,
To this wan Auroral world!
“Ghost of Psyche, uncompanioned,
Are the yester-years all done?
Have the oars of Charon ferried
All thy playmates from the sun?
“In thy wings the beat and breathing
Of the wind of life abides,
And the night whose sea-gray cohorts
Swing the stars up with the tides.
“Did they once make sail and wander
Through the trembling harvest sky,
Where the silent Northern streamers
Change and rest not till they die?
“Or from clouds that tent and people
The blue firmamental waste,
Did they learn the noiseless secret
Of eternity’s unhaste?
“Where learned they to rove and loiter,
By the margin of what sea?
Was it with outworn Demeter,
Searching for Persephone?
“Or did that girl-queen behold thee
In the fields of moveless air?
Did these wings which break no whisper
Brush the poppies in her hair?
“Is it thence they wear the pulvil—
Ash of ruined days and sleep,
And the two great orbs of splendid
Melting sable deep on deep!
“Pilot of the shadow people,
Steering whither by what star
Hast thou come to hapless port here,
Thou gray ghost of Arrochar?”
For man walks the world with mourning
Down to death, and leaves no trace,
With the dust upon his forehead,
And the shadow in his face.
Pillared dust and fleeing shadow
As the roadside wind goes by,
And the fourscore years that vanish
In the twinkling of an eye.
Beauty, the fine frosty trace-work
Of some breath upon the pane;
Spirit, the keen wintry moonlight
Flashed thereon to fade again.
Beauty, the white clouds a-building
When God said and it was done;
Spirit, the sheer brooding rapture
Where no mid-day brooks no sun.
So. And here, the open casement
Where my fellow-mate goes free;
Eastward, the untrodden star-road
And the long wind on the sea.
What’s to hinder but I follow
This my gypsy guide afar,
When the bugle rouses slumber
Sounding taps on Arrochar?
“Where, my brother, wends the by-way,
To what bourne beneath what sun,
Thou and I are set to travel
Till the shifting dream be done?
“Comrade of the dusk, forever
I pursue the endless way
Of the dust and shadew kindred,
Thou art perfect for a day.
“Yet from beauty marred and broken,
Joy and memory and tears,
I shall crush the clearer honey
In the harvest of the years.
“Thou art faultless as a flower
Wrought of sun and wind and snow,
I survive the fault and failure.
The wise Fates will have it so.
“For man walks the world in twilight,
But the morn shall wipe all trace
Of the dust from off his forehead,
And the shadow from his face.
“Cheer thee on, my tidings-bearer!
All the valor of the North
Mounts as soul from flesh escaping
Through the night, and bids thee forth.
“Go, and when thou hast discovered
Her whose dark eyes match thy wings,
Bid that lyric heart beat lighter
For the joy thy beauty brings.”
Then I leaned far out and lifted
My light guest up, and bade speed
On the trail where no one tarries
That wayfarer few will heed.
Pale gray dust upon my fingers;
And from this my cabined room
The white soul of eager message
Racing seaward in the gloom.
Far off shore, the sweet low calling
Of the bell-buoy on the bar,
Warning night of dawn and ruin
Lonelily on Arrochar.