Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and so here are always the others, those who have been over the way, the women who know each one the end of life’s gamble for her, the meaning and the clue, the how and the why of the dances and the arms that passed around their waists and the fingers that played in their hair.

Faces go by written over: “I know it all, I know where the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories,” and the feet of these move slower and they have wisdom where the others have beauty.

So the green and the gray move in the early morning on the downtown streets.

Trafficker

Among the shadows where two streets cross,

A woman lurks in the dark and waits

To move on when a policeman heaves in view.

Smiling a broken smile from a face

Painted over haggard bones and desperate eyes,

All night she offers passers-by what they will

Of her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone,

And no takers.

Harrison Street Court

I heard a woman’s lips

Speaking to a companion

Say these words:

“A woman what hustles

Never keeps nothin’

For all her hustlin’.

Somebody always gets

What she goes on the street for.

If it ain’t a pimp

It’s a bull what gets it.

I been hustlin’ now

Till I ain’t much good any more.

I got nothin’ to show for it

Some man got it all,

Every night’s hustlin’ I ever did.”

Gone

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.

Far off

Everybody loved her.

So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold

On a dream she wants.

Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.

Nobody knows why she packed her trunk . . . a few old things

And is gone,

Gone with her little chin

Thrust ahead of her

And her soft hair blowing careless

From under a wide hat,

Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.

Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?

Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts?

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer.

Nobody knows where she’s gone.

Soiled Dove

Let us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she married a corporation lawyer who picked her from a Ziegfeld chorus.

Before then she never took anybody’s money and paid for her silk stockings out of what she earned singing and dancing.

She loved one man and he loved six women and the game was changing her looks, calling for more and more massage money and high coin for the beauty doctors.

Now she drives a long, underslung motor car all by herself, reads in the day’s papers what her husband is doing to the inter-state commerce commission, requires a larger corsage from year to year, and wonders sometimes how one man is coming along with six women.

Old Woman

The owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo

From building and battered paving-stone;

The headlight scoffs at the mist