The Bat]

By Bunker Hill’s tall obelisk, till the August sun awakes, I brood and stalk blue shadows, and my mad heart breaks. Thoughts of a hunt unutterable ring the obelisk around. And a thousand glorious sphinxes spring, singing, from the ground. Very white young Salem witches ride them down the west. The gravel makes a flat, lone track, the eye has endless rest. Fair girls and beasts charge, dreaming, through the salt-sand white as snow, Hunting the three-toed pony, while mysterious slaughters flow. And the bat from the salt desert sucks the clouds on high Until they fall in ashes, and all the sky is dry. Oh, the empty Spanish Missions, where the bells ring without hand, As we drive the shadowy dinosaurs and mammoths through the sand.”

And then I contradicted him, in a manner firm and flat. “I have never seen, in the sun-kissed Hub, circuses like that.” “So much the worse for you, my cub,” said the slant-eyed mountain-cat.

And the cat continued with his yarn, while I stood there marveling:-- “I here proclaim that I am not a vague, an abstract thing. I like to eat the turkey-leg, the lamb, the chickenwing. Yet the cat that knows not fasting, the cat that knows not dream, That has not drunk dim mammoth-blood from the long-dead desert stream, That has not rolled in the alkali-encrusted pits of bones By the saber-toothed white tiger’s cave, where he kicked the ancient stones, Has not known sacred Boston. Our gods are burning ore. Our Colorado gods are the stars of heaven’s floor. But the god of Massachusetts is a Tiger they adore.

“From that saber-tooth’s ghost-purring goes the whispered word of power In the sunset, in the moonlight, in the purple sunrise hour:-- That an Indian chief is born, in a teepee, to the west, That a school of rattlesnakes is rattling, on the mountain’s breast, That an opal has been grubbed from the ground by a mole, That a bumble-bee has found a new way to save his soul. In Egyptian granite Boston, the rumor has gone round That new ways to tame the whirlwind have been marvelously found. That a Balanced Rock has fallen, that a battle has been won In the soul of some young touch-me-not, some tigerish Emerson.”

And then I contradicted him, in a manner firm and flat. “Boston people do not read their Emerson like that.” “So much the worse for Boston,” said the self-reliant cat. Then I saw the cat there towering, like a cat cut from a hill:-- A prophet-beast of Nature’s law, staring with stony will, Pacing on the icy top, then stretched in drowsy thought, Then, listening, on tiptoe, to the voice the snowwind brought, Tearing at the fire-killed pine trees, kittenish again, Then speaking like a lion, long made president of men:-- “There are such holy plains and streams, there are such sky-arched spaces, There are life-long trails for private lives, and endless whispering places. Range is so wide there is not room for lust and poison breath And flesh may walk in Eden, forgetting shame and death.”

And then I contradicted him, in a manner firm and flat. “I have never heard, in Boston, of anything like that.” “Boston is peculiar. Boston is mysterious. You do not know your Boston,” said the wise, fastidious cat, And turned again to lick the skull of his prey, the mountain-rat! And at that, he broke off his wild dream of a perfect human race. And I walked down to the aspen grove where is neither time nor place, Nor measurement, nor space, except that grass has room And aspen leaves whisper on forever in their grace. All day they watch along the banks. All night the perfume goes From the Mariposa’s chalice to the marble mountain-rose, In the Boston of their beauty-sleep, when storm-flowers Are in bloom, In the mystery of their beauty-sleep, when storm-flowers Are in bloom.