Collected Poems (Robinson)/Old Trails
For other versions of this work, see Old Trails.
OLD TRAILS
(Washington Square)
I met him, as one meets a ghost or two, Between the gray Arch and the old Hotel. "King Solomon was right, there's nothing new," Said he. "Behold a ruin who meant well."
He led me down familiar steps again,Appealingly, and set me in a chair."My dreams have all come true to other men,"Said he; "God lives, however, and why care?
"An hour among the ghosts will do no harm."He laughed, and something glad within me sank.I may have eyed him with a faint alarm,For now his laugh was lost in what he drank.
"They chill things here with ice from hell," he said;"I might have known it." And he made a faceThat showed again how much of him was dead,And how much was alive and out of place,
And out of reach. He knew as well as IThat all the words of wise men who are skilledIn using them are not much to defyWhat comes when memory meets the unfulfilled.
What evil and infirm perversityHad been at work with him to bring him back?Never among the ghosts, assuredly,Would he originate a new attack;
Never among the ghosts, or anywhere,Till what was dead of him was put away,Would he attain to his offended shareOf honor among others of his day.
"You ponder like an owl," he said at last;"You always did, and here you have a cause.For I'm a confirmation of the past,A vengeance, and a flowering of what was.
"Sorry? Of course you are, though you compress,With even your most impenetrable fears,A placid and a proper consciousnessOf anxious angels over my arrears.
"I see them there against me in a bookAs large as hope, in ink that shines by nightSurely I see; but now I'd rather lookAt you, and you are not a pleasant sight.
"Forbear, forgive. Ten years are on my soul,And on my conscience. I've an incubus:My one distinction, and a parlous tollTo glory; but hope lives on clamorous.
"'Twas hope, though heaven I grant you knows of what—The kind that blinks and rises when it falls,Whether it sees a reason why or not—That heard Broadway's hard-throated siren-calls;
"'Twas hope that brought me through December storms,To shores again where I'll not have to beA lonely man with only foreign wormsTo cheer him in his last obscurity.
"But what it was that hurried me down hereTo be among the ghosts, I leave to you.My thanks are yours, no less, for one thing clear:Though you are silent, what you say is true.
"There may have been the devil in my feet,For down I blundered, like a fugitive,To find the old room in Eleventh Street.God save us!—I came here again to live."
We rose at that, and all the ghosts rose then,And followed us unseen to his old room.No longer a good place for living menWe found it, and we shivered in the gloom.
The goods he took away from there were few,And soon we found ourselves outside once more,Where now the lamps along the AvenueBloomed white for miles above an iron floor.
"Now lead me to the newest of hotels,"He said, "and let your spleen be undeceived:This ruin is not myself, but some one else;I haven't failed; I've merely not achieved."
Whether he knew or not, he laughed and dinedWith more of an immune regardlessnessOf pits before him and of sands behindThan many a child at forty would confess;
And after, when the bells in Boris rangTheir tumult at the Metropolitan,He rocked himself, and I believe he sang."God lives," he crooned aloud, "and I'm the man!"
He was. And even though the creature spoiledAll prophecies, I cherish his acclaim.Three weeks he fattened; and five years he toiledIn Yonkers,—and then sauntered into fame.
And he may go now to what streets he will—Eleventh, or the last, and little care;But he would find the old room very stillOf evenings, and the ghosts would all be there.
I doubt if he goes after them; I doubtIf many of them ever come to him.His memories are like lamps, and they go out;Or if they burn, they flicker and are dim.
A light of other gleams he has to-dayAnd adulations of applauding hosts;A famous danger, but a safer wayThan growing old alone among the ghosts.
But we may still be glad that we were wrong:lie fooled us, and we'd shrivel to deny it;Though sometimes when old echoes ring too long,I wish the bells in Boris would be quiet.