I. There was a house once, dropt between a factory and a lumber yard, on a perhaps street, crossing, with a systematic carelessness, the dock side of town. And that street knew frequent football in the gray of morning, and frequent football in the gray of evening, and the taste of all day smoke, and the smell of all night rain ; and low conversations on corners ; and the sound of a Polish dance, two flights up, four blocks away..... 2. That street was a haphazard drawing scrawled by a tramp on a brick wall, a thousand miles from home, and still going..... For they all hit the freights on the north side of town bound for some place. 3. And that street was as the womb of a peasant woman : tired of giving, giving, tired of giving, always giving..... On to the baptismal font, the gray procession, encountering, merging the always assured taunt of listless, hovering gray above, and patiently calculating gray below, goes ; there, mirrored in the heavens, the laugh blazoned eternally above the cenotaph of years, of men..... 4. Listen : I tell you somehow was always edging into that street from somewhere..... 5. And in a house lived a man who obeyed the whistle, and a woman who obeyed a man, and children who played wild games on the street at dusk between the shadows, square shadows, sullen before the curve of dusty winds..... 6. Don’t kiss five years good-bye with a laugh, any of you ; Only old men boast of time as a mistress, only the gray ones. And tell me, friend : “Somewhere behind the precisions of today, in the half-forgotten somewhere, are there not momentary visions to allay the myriad clang of bar on bar, and the myriad glare of light on light after the going of the day?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But no ; the eyes are dead, only a laugh, only a snicker, from behind gray, onto gray..... Behind : the undertakers, dressed in pink between the shadows of the lamp-posts slink..... Before : the shriek of factory whistles down an autumn sky. 7. For they all hit the freights on the north side of town, bound for some place..... Some years ago, a Polish woman grew geraniums in a bed around the house… where is she… where her husband, where her children… the wind has forgotten to mutter where. Perhaps moon light and early sun light on the bay can tell you. I heard a half-wit on a wharf muttering of women in half a hundred cities… He ought to know, he ought to know— he knows the lonely cry of freights, skirting the aloofness of hills, but then, he has forgotten much..... and the geraniums are dead, oh yes, the geraniums are dead, and a year-dishevelled bicycle sprawls, scattered foolishly, across the empty bed. 8. The Polish woman and her husband and children are gone… gone somewhere, somewhere away… Marco Polo in a side-car, Abraham in a wheelbarrow… Stop next year ; drop from your freight on your way back, if you ever come back ; look in on the perhaps street ambling drunkenly in search of water… you may find geraniums growing before the door.