Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (522 page)
Read Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) Online
Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald
White lanes and pink lanes, strung with purple roses,
Dancing from a meadow, weaving from a hill,
Beckoning the boy streets with stray smiles wanton,
Strung with purple roses that the dawn must chill.
Soon will they meet, tiptoe on the corners,
Kiss behind the foliage of the leaf-filled dark.
Avenues and highroads, bridlepaths and parkways,
All must trace the pattern that the street-lamps mark.
Steps stop sharp! A clamor and a running!
Light upon the corner spills the milk of dawn.
Now the lamps are fading and a blue-winged silence
Settles like a swallow on a dew-drenched lawn.
OH, SISTER, CAN YOU SPARE YOUR HEART
I may be a What-ho, a No-can-do
Even a banker, but I can love you
As well as a better man
a letter-man of fame
As well as any Mr. Whosis you can name
The little break in my voice
— or Rolls-Royce
take your choice
I may lose
You must choose
So choose
A hundred thousand in gold
and you’re sold
to the old
and I’m broke
when our days a
are gold
I’m begging
begging
Oh, Sister, can you spare your heart?
Those wealthy goats
In racoon coats
can wolf you away from me
But draw your latch
For an honest patch
the skin of necessity
(we’ll make it a tent, dear)
The funny patch in my pants
take a chance
ask your aunts
What’s a loss
You must toss
So toss!
A gap inside that’s for good.
You’ll be good
As you should
Touch wood!
I’m begging
begging
Oh, Sister, can you spare your heart?
LAMP IN THE WINDOW
Do you remember, before keys turned in the locks,
When life was a close-up, and not an occasional letter,
That I hated to swim naked from the rocks
While you liked absolutely nothing better?
Do you remember many hotel bureaus that had
Only three drawers? But the only bother
Was that each of us got holy, then got mad
Trying to give the third one to the other.
East, west, the little car turned, often wrong
Up an erroneous Alp, an unmapped Savoy river.
We blamed each other, wild were our words and strong,
And, in an hour, laughed and called it liver.
And, though the end was desolate and unkind:
To turn the calendar at June and find December
On the next leaf; still, stupid-got with grief, I find
These are the only quarrels that I can remember.
OH MISSELDINE’S
Oh Misseldine’s, dear Misseldine’s,
A dive we’ll ne’er forget,
The taste of its banana splits
Is on our tonsils yet.
Its chocolate fudge makes livers budge,
It’s really too divine,
And as we reel, we’ll give one squeal
For dear old Misseldine’s.
PRINCETON — THE LAST DAY
The last light wanes and drifts across the land,
The low, long land, the sunny land of spires.
The ghosts of evening tune again their lyres
And wander singing, in a plaintive band
Down the long corridors of trees. Pale fires
Echo the night from tower top to tower.
Oh sleep that dreams and dream that never tires,
Press from the petals of the lotus-flower
Something of this to keep, the essence of an hour!
No more to wait the twilight of the moon
In this sequestrated vale of star and spire;
For one, eternal morning of desire
Passes to time and earthy afternoon.
Here, Heracletus, did you build of fire
And changing stuffs your prophecy far hurled
Down the dead years; this midnight I aspire
To see, mirrored among the embers, curled
In flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.
THE STAYING UP ALL NIGHT
The warm fire.
The comfortable chairs.
The merry companions.
The stroke of twelve.
The wild suggestion.
The good sports.
The man who hasn’t slept for weeks.
The people who have done it before.
The long anecdotes.
The best looking girl yawns.
The forced raillery.
The stroke of one.
The best looking girl goes to bed.
The stroke of two.
The empty pantry.
The lack of firewood.
The second best looking girl goes to bed.
The weather-beaten ones who don’t.
The stroke of four.
The dozing off.
The amateur “life of the party.”
The burglar scare.
The scornful cat.
The trying to impress the milkman.
The scorn of the milkman.
The lunatic feeling.
The chilly sun.
The stroke of six.
The walk in the garden.
The sneezing.
The early risers.
The volley of wit at you.
The feeble come back.
The tasteless breakfast.
The miserable day.
8 P.M. — Between the sheets.
THOUSAND-AND-FIRST SHIP
In the fall of sixteen
In the cool of the afternoon
I saw Helena
Under a white moon —
I heard Helena
In a haunted doze
Say: “I know a gay place
Nobody knows.”
Her voice promised
She’d live with me there,
She’d bring everything -
I needn’t care:
Patches to mend my clothes
When they were torn,
Sunshine from Maryland,
Where I was born.
My kind of weather,
As wild as wild,
And a funny book
I wanted as a child;
Sugar and, you know,
Reason and Rhyme,
And water like water
I had one time.
There’d be an orchestra
Bingo! Bango!
Playing for us
To dance the tango,
And people would clap
When we arose,
At her sweet face
And my new clothes.
But more than all this
Was the promise she made
That nothing, nothing,
Ever would fade —
Nothing would fade
Winter or fall,
Nothing would fade,
Practically nothing at all.
Helena went off
And married another,
She may be dead
Or some man’s mother.
I have no grief left
But I’d like to know
If she took him
Where she promised we’d go.
OUR APRIL LETTER
This is April again. Roller skates rain slowly down the street.
Your voice far away on the phone.
Once I would have jumped like a clown through a hoop — but.
“Then the area of infection has increased? … Oh … What can I expect after all — I’ve had worse shocks, anyhow, I know and that’s something.” (Like hell it is, but it’s what you say to an X-ray doctor.)
Then the past whispering faint now on another phone:
“Is there any change?”
“Little or no change.”
“I see.”
The roller skates rain down the streets,
The black cars shine between the leaves,
Your voice far away:
“I am going with my daughter to the country. My husband left today… No he knows nothing.”
“Good.”
I have asked a lot of my emotions — one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something — not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.
Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in.
Hold on, there’s a drop left there … No, it was just the way the light fell.
But your voice on the telephone. If I hadn’t abused words so, what you said might have meant something. But one hundred and twenty stories…
April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paint-box.
SAD CATASTROPHE
We don’t want visitors, we said:
They come and sit for hours and hours;
They come when we have gone to bed;
They are imprisoned here by showers;
They come when they are low and bored -
Drink from the bottle of your heart.
Once it is emptied, the gay horde,
Shouting the Rubaiyat, depart.
I balked: I was at work, I cried;
Appeared unshaven or not at all;
Was out of gin; the cook had died
Of small-pox — and more tales as tall.
On boor and friend I turned the same
Dull eye, the same impatient tone —
The ones with beauty, sense and fame
Perceived we wished to be alone.
But dull folk, dreary ones and rude -
Long talker, lonely soul and quack —
Who hereto hadn’t dare intrude,
Found us alone, swarmed to attack,
Thought silence was attention; rage
An echo of their own home’s war —
Glad we had ceased to ‘be upstage.’
— But the nice people came no more.
ONE SOUTHERN GIRL
.
Lolling down on the edge of time
Where the flower months fade as the days move over,
Days that are long like lazy rhyme,
Nights that are pale with the moon and the clover,
Summer there is a dream of summer
Rich with dusks for a lover’s food —
Who is the harlequin, who is the mummer,
You or time or the multitude?
Still does your hair’s gold light the ground
And dazzle the blind till their old ghosts rise?
Then, all you care to find being found,
Are you yet kind to their hungry eyes?
Part of a song, a remembered glory —
Say there’s one rose that lives and might
Whisper the fragments of our story:
Kisses, a lazy street — and night
TO BOATH
There was a flutter from the wings of God + you lay dead.
Your books were in your desk I guess + some unfinished chaos in your head
Was dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies
THE POPE AT CONFESSION
The gorgeous Vatican was steeped in night,
The organs trembled on my heart no more,
But with a blend of colors on my sight
I loitered through a somber corridor;
When suddenly I heard behind a screen
The faintest whisper as from one in prayer;
I glanced about, then passed, for I had seen
A hushed, dim-lighted room — and two were there.
A ragged friar, half in dream’s embrace,
Leaned sideways, soul intent, as if to seize
The last grey ice of sin that ached to melt
And faltered from the lips of him who knelt,
A little bent old man upon his knees
With pain and sorrow in his holy face.
RAIN BEFORE DAWN
The dull, faint patter in the drooping hours
Drifts in upon my sleep and fills my hair
With damp; the burden of the heavy air
In strewn upon me where my tired soul cowers,
Shrinking like some lone queen in empty towers
Dying. Blind with unrest I grow aware:
The pounding broad wings drifts down the stair
And sates me like the heavy scent of flowers.
I lie upon heart. My eyes like hands
Grip at the soggy pillow. Now the dawn
Tears from her wetted breast the spattered blouse
Of night; lead-eyed and moist she straggles o’er the lawn.
Between the curtains brooding stares and stands
Like some drenched swimmer — Death’s within the house
The Non-Fiction
LIST OF ESSAYS AND ARTICLES
CONTEMPORARY WRITERS AND THEIR WORK
“WHAT I WAS ADVISED TO DO — AND DIDN’T”
SOME STORIES THEY LIKE TO TELL AGAIN
HOW TO LIVE ON PRACTICALLY NOTHING A YEAR