(Crief speaks about crime)
I’ve collected here a few, odd things:
a piece of paper a girl once tore,
a trifle of hair on a ***** sheet,
and a few keepsakes from a ransacked store,
and I’ve put them all in the bag I bought
and have set them in that corner so.
I was planning to leave but the weather changed,
and the sky grew grey with a **** of snow,
so I sat quite still on the bed I knew
and imagined the girl in her darkening years
and my thoughts were goads and devils of fire
so I lowered my head in a rage of tears;
but soon afterwards I stopped to think:
if she comes home now, she will find me here,
and her cupboards upset and her letters torn,
and a man on her bed in a rage of care;
and I think of her neck and defenceless sides,
her naked arms and her meaningless legs,
the substance that moves through nerves of cells
as easy to smash as yoky bits in eggs;
and I frighten myself with my vision then
and the street as dark and as quiet as death
with only the snow like a huge, white ****
floating outside in a cavort of breath;
and I look between my mind and hear
a single cry as intense as life
and afterwards snow, the silence outside,
a fog-horn sounding, a man named Crief
appearing and going down to a pond
to undo himself in the dead of night,
and finding the water frozen stiff
and hard and seamed in an icy blight!
And I whimper, then I jump to my feet,
I prowl past the door, like a beast from a lair,
but freeze in the frame, in the dead of the dark,
for lightly her footstep ascends that stair!