No More Learning

These people watch me,
I yield them my adventure.

Lazily I lounge through labyrinthine corridors,
And with eyes suddenly altered,
I peer into an office I do not know,
And wonder at a startled face that penetrates my own.

Roses--pavement--
I will take all this city away with me--
People--uproar--the pavement jostling and flickering--
Women with incredible eyelids:
Dandies in spats:
Hard-faced throng discussing me--I know them all.
I will take them away with me,
I insistently rob them of their essence,
I must have it all before night,
To sing amid my green.

I glide out unobservant
In the midst of the traffic
Blown like a leaf
Hither and thither,
Till the city resolves itself into a clamour of voices,
Crying hollowly, like the wind rustling through the forest,
Against the frozen housefronts:
Lost in the glitter of a million movements.

PERIPETEIA

I can no longer find a place for myself:
I go.

There are too many things to detain me,
But the force behind is reckless.

Noise, uproar, movement
Slide me outwards,
Black sleet shivering
Down red walls.

In thick jungles of green, this gyration,
My centrifugal folly,
Through roaring dust and futility spattered,
Will find its own repose.

Golden lights will gleam out sullenly into silence,
Before I return.

MID-FLIGHT

We rush, a black throng,
Straight upon darkness:
Motes scattered
By the arc's rays.

Over the bridge fluttering,
It is theatre-time,
No one heeds.

Lost amid greenness
We will sleep all night;
And in the morning
Coming forth, we will shake wet wings
Over the settled dust of to-day.

The city hurls its cobbled streets after us,
To drive us faster.

We must attain the night
Before endless processions
Of lamps
Push us back.
A clock with quivering hands
Leaps to the trajectory-angle of our departure.

We leave behind pale traces of achievement:
Fires that we kindled but were too tired to put out,
Broad gold fans brushing softly over dark walls,
Stifled uproar of night.

We are already cast forth:
The signal of our departure
Jerks down before we have learned we are to go.

STATION

We descend
Into a wall of green.
Straggling shapes:
Afterwards none are seen.

I find myself
Alone.
I look back:
The city has grown.

One grey wall
Windowed, unlit.
Heavily, night
Crushes the face of it.

I go on.
My memories freeze
Like birds' cry
In hollow trees.

I go on.
Up and outright
To the hostility
Of night.




F. S. FLINT



F.