Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth
bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved
them.
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet,
it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies
bulge to the
sun, they do not ask who seizes
fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant
and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
12
The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens
his knife
at the stall in the market,
I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and
break-down.
Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the
anvil,
Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there
is a great heat in
the fire.
From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their
movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their
massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand
so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.
13
The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses,
the block swags
underneath on its tied-over
chain,
The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard,
steady and
tall he stands pois’d
on one leg on the string-piece,
His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and
loosens over
his hip-band,
His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch
of his hat
away from his forehead,
The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls
on the black of
his polish’d and perfect
limbs.
I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I
do not stop there,
I go with the team also.
In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward
as well as
forward sluing,
To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or
object missing,
Absorbing all to myself and for this song.
Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the
leafy shade, what
is that you express in your
eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read
in my life.
My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my
distant and
day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.
I believe in those wing’d purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within
me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown
intentional,
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she
is not something else,
And the in the woods never studied the gamut, yet
trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out
of me.
14 The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation, The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close, Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.