in having been, always, the only confidant

like the earth

or the sea.

DAWNS

I have come

from pride

all the way up to humility
This day-to-night.

The hill

was more terrible

than ever before.

This is the top;

there is the tall, slim tree.
It isn't bent; it doesn't lean;
It is only looking back.

At dawn,

under that tree,

still another me of mine

was buried.

Waiting for me to come again,

humorously solicitous

of what I bring next,
it looks down.

HER EYES

Her eyes hold black whips-
dart of a whip
lashing, nay, flicking,
nay, merely caressing

the hide of a heart

and a broncho tears through canyons—

walls reverberating,

sluggish streams

shaken to rapids and torrents

storm destroying

silence and solitude!

Her eyes throw black lariats

one for his head,

one for his heels

and the beast lies vanquished

walls still,

streams still—

except for a tarn,

or is it a pool,

or is it a whirlpool

twitching with memory?

IMPROVISATION

Wind:

Why do you play

that long beautiful adagio,

that archaic air,

Arthur Davison Ficke was born at Davenport, Iowa, November 10, 1883. He received his A.B. at Harvard (1904), studied for the law and was admitted to the bar in 1908. In 1919, after two years' service in France, he gave up his law practice and devoted himself to literature exclusively.

Ficke is the author of ten volumes of verse, the most representative of which are Sonnets of a Portrait Painter (1914), The Man on the Hilltop (1915) and An April Elegy (1917). In these, the author has distilled a warm spirituality, combining freshness of vision with an intensified seriousness.

Having been an expert collector and student of Japanese prints, Ficke has written two books on this theme. His intellectual equipment is reinforced by a strong sense of satire. Writing under the pseudonym "Anne Knish," he was one of the co-authors (with Witter Bynner) of Spectra (1916), which,

caricaturing some of the wilder outgrowths of the new poetry, was taken seriously by a majority of the critics and proved to be a brilliant hoax.

PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN

She limps with halting painful pace,
Stops, wavers and creeps on again;
Peers up with dim and questioning face,
Void of desire or doubt or pain.

Her cheeks hang gray in waxen folds
Wherein there stirs no blood at all.
A hand, like bundled cornstalks, holds
The tatters of a faded shawl.

Where was a breast, sunk bones she clasps;
A knot jerks where were woman-hips;
A ropy throat sends writhing gasps
Up to the tight line of her lips.

Here strong the city's pomp is poured

She stands, unhuman, bleak, aghast:

An empty temple of the Lord

From which the jocund Lord has passed.

He has builded him another house,

Whenceforth his flame, renewed and bright,
Shines stark upon these weathered brows
Abandoned to the final night.

THE THREE SISTERS

Gone are the three, those sisters rare
With wonder-lips and eyes ashine.
One was wise and one was fair,

And one was mine.

Ye mourners, weave for the sleeping hair
Of only two, your ivy vine.

For one was wise and one was fair,
But one was mine.

SONNET

There are strange shadows fostered of the moon,
More numerous than the clear-cut shade of day.
Go forth, when all the leaves whisper of June,
Into the dusk of swooping bats at play;
Or go into that late November dusk
When hills take on the noble lines of death,
And on the air the faint, astringent musk
Of rotting leaves pours vaguely troubling breath.
Then shall you see shadows whereof the sun,
Knows nothing-aye, a thousand shadows there
Shall leap and flicker and stir and stay and run,
Like petrels of the changing foul or fair;
Like ghosts of twilight, of the moon, of him
Whose homeland lies past each horizon's rim. . .