Adopted Son

TWO POEMS

ADOPTED SON

He has put on, as if it were a coat, .

The look of his surroundings. Towers and lands

Are at his back; the tiny boat

He plays with is a yacht;

His talk runs pleasantly of sea and sands.

A steady dominant tot,

With something quite his own

In the faun-tilted eyes that have forgot

A grim dark house of stone,

Beneath whose narrow door

He, weeping, had been led,

Wearing his stained and dirty pinafore-

One boy of many, with a shaven head.

The lady he calls "mother" wished a son,

And searching, found him in uncouth disguise,

Knowing at sight the one

Who should make fast the ties

Between herself and living;

Fill vacant rooms and halls,

Become a part-a fancy that took weight-

Of what was in her giving:

Wide acres and the orchards and gray walls,

Houses and books and porcelains centuries old,

A name more than accustomed to its state,

The sleeping power that's gold.

He had the bearing-something in his stride-

That gave her strength to bring him boldly in

(A foundling strange, faun-eyed),

And say, "My heir!"-

A woman with white fingers long and thin,

Remote, unreal and lovely in her chair.

So they were son and mother till it seemed

This must be true.

She was not one who dreamed

Half fearfully, sounding the shadowed depths;

But found life new,

Took pleasure in his laughter, voice, demands,

The tumbling cascade of staccato steps,

His head beneath her hands.

And yet, if he should storm, as he could do,

Stiffen his legs, grow passionate and dark,

She'd look at him, look through,

Seeing on him the mark

Of skulking guests she had invited in,

Strangers who ply the currents of his blood,

Who yet might grip him-win:

Sullen-eyed men, women of senseless grin,

Plunderers toiling deep in fire and flood,

Scarred folk with twisted neck and sideward leer,

Stained with the gutter's mud;

Brawlers who slink to walls when steps sound near,

And fauns with shaggy skin-

These on her hearth beneath

The staff in stone crowned with the laurel wreath.

But she was staunch, however fast might run

The mists before her face,

Taking him for her son,

Her very son,

And for his race?-

There was a tale from which she had spun

A legend of bright grace:

A tale of two, who ran to climb a hill,

Lean clinging silhouettes on a velvet sky,

Exiles with proud sweet words from some far place-

Two shadows running upward, of one will,

When the moon was high-

Two in the night, when earth and star were still

And the wind went by.