And fixes its yellow rays in the cold slow rain;

Against a pane I press my forehead

And drowsily look on the walls and sidewalks.

The headlight finds the way

And life is gone from the wet and the welter—

Only an old woman, bloated, disheveled and bleared

Far-wandered waif of other days,

Huddles for sleep in a doorway,

Homeless.

Washerwoman

The washerwoman is a member of the Salvation Army.

And over the tub of suds rubbing underwear clean

She sings that Jesus will wash her sins away

And the red wrongs she has done God and man

Shall be white as driven snow.

Rubbing underwear she sings of the Last Great Washday.

Gypsy Mother

In a hole-in-a-wall on Halsted Street sits a gypsy woman,

In a garish gas-lit rendezvous, in a humpback higgling hole-in-a-wall.

The left hand is a tattler; stars and oaths and alphabets

Commit themselves and tell happenings gone, happenings to come, pathways of honest people, hypocrites.

“Long pointed fingers mean imagination; a star on the third finger says a black shadow walks near.”

Cross the gypsy’s hand with fifty cents and she takes your left hand and reads how you shall be happy in love, or not, and whether you die rich, or not.

Signs outside the hole-in-a-wall say so, misspell the promises, scrawl the superior gypsy mysteries.

A red shawl on her shoulders falls with a fringe hem to a green skirt;

Chains of yellow beads sweep from her neck to her tawny hands.

Fifty springtimes must have kissed her mouth holding a calabash pipe.

She pulls slow contemplative puffs of smoke; she is a shape for ghosts of contemplation to sit around and ask why something cheap as happiness is here and more besides, chapped lips, rough eyes, red shawl.

She is thinking about somebody and something the same as Whistler’s mother sat and thought about somebody and something.

In a hole-in-a-wall on Halsted Street are stars, oaths, alphabets.

Implications

When the charge of election bribery was brought against an Illinois senator, he replied, “I read the Bible and believe it from cover to cover.”

When his accusers specified five hundred dollars of corruption money was paid in a St. Louis hotel bathroom, his friends answered, “He is faithful to his wife and always kind to his children.”

When he was ousted from the national senate and the doors of his bank were closed by government receivers and a grand jury indicted him, he took the vows of an old established church.

When a jury acquitted him of guilt as a bank wrecker, following the testimony of prominent citizens that he was an honest man, he issued a statement to the public for the newspapers, proclaiming he knew beforehand no jury would darken the future of an honest man with an unjust verdict.

Graceland

Tomb of a millionaire,

A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,

Place of the dead where they spend every year

The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars

For upkeep and flowers

To keep fresh the memory of the dead.