Capitolo 1
THE HOUSE DI DUST
A Symphony
FROM
CONRAD AIKEN
To Jessie
NOTE
. . . Parts of this poem have been printed in "The American north
Makes a review, Others, Poetry, Youth, social Circle, You Revision" of Yale. . . . I am
gotten into debt to Lafcadio Hearn for the episode "I Screen her Young girl he/she called"
partly II.
THE HOUSE DI DUST
DIVIDES ME.
ME.
The sun goes down to a pale and cold shine of light.
The trees grow the dark: the shades tilt him to the east:
It is lights they kill the occhiolino through the windows, one to the time.
A clamor of icy sirens cries to the night.
Blackboard-grey and pale clouds turn above from the hollow sun.
And the wandering one, the dreamer that investigates of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the road,
And it lifts his/her palms for the first ghost of pluvius cold.
Jump of lights the hill reddens down him in front of him.
The sumptuous night has started again.
'I will ask to all of them, I will ask to them all of their dreams,
I will hold my light above of them and I will look for their faces.
I will feel them whisper, invisible in their veins. . .'
The eternal asker of answers becomes as the obscurity,
Or as a wind blown on an innumerable forest,
Or as the innumerable voices of long-drawn rains.
We feel him/it to us and we pick him/it up among us as a wind of music,
As the ghost of a music we have felt in some place;
We crowd there through the roads in a shine of pale lamplight,
We pour in a left wave, climbs a step,
With laughter and he/she cries, and it puts in words on murmured word;
We flow, we come down, we turn. . . and the eternal dreamer
Moved among us as light as air in the evening. . .
Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
The rain works on the flooring in front of our feet,
The cold precipitations, the rain sings.
We walk, we race, we ride. We turn there the faces
To what brings the eternal evening.
Our hands have warm and raw with the stones that we have placed,
We have built a tower of tall stone in the sky,
We have built a city of towers.
Our hands are light, they is singing with empty.