60
PARTISAN REVIEW
you suddenly begin to sense that you would enjoy your newly
awakened sense of beauty more if you could understand why
you felt such a kinship with the grass and the river and the trees,
and if you had the right to feel that kinship. And I do, Betty.
Not like the Minnesota poetess who wanted to roll in fresh,
green grass, but like one who knows the grass, and whom the
grass knows.
But while
I
was walking in the Fenway
I
began to wonder
whether or not
I
had the right to assume such kinship, and
I
thought of it as something
I
should settle with myself, and the
grass, perhaps, too.
For
I
rose up from beneath the grass and my body was
moulded of the stuff of grass and the body of the grass is nour–
ished by dust of bodies like mine.
For one day
I
was sitting on a stone wall warm in the sun,
and
I
went away leaving some of me in the stone wall, and some
of the stone wall was in me, and the sun was in both of us.
And one night
I
saw a tree blossoming in the moonlight,
~nd
I
thought
I
had known it before, and had felt it blossoming
111
me.
And, another night, I had a fist fight with Paul, and the
thud of my fist rebounding off his warm, firm flesh, and the
stinging ache in my shoulder where his fist hit me, this was all
good, it was great, it was rowdy.
Then I thought of a girl in a checked gray skirt and a black
velvet jacket climbing a stairway stinking with defective drains;
a rickety, broken down, swaybacked stairway, reaching up, lad–
der-like, to a filthy skylight over a door with the number
10
in
chalk on it. The girl had a bundle of papers under her arm. The
door rattled under the light rapping of her fist. A chair, re–
leased, cracked like old bones. There were heavy footsteps, and
a middle aged Negro woman opened the door.
"Hello," the girl says, her smile asking for a return smile;
getting one.
"Hello, deah." The woman, with one palm smoothing her
apron over her fleshy hip, is wondering.
"Do you read the Daily Worker?" The girl, looking frank–
ly, questioningly, into the woman's eyes, liking her, her brown
polished face, her stiff black hair stretched tautly from her brow,
her thick, pink lips a little parted, a little worried, her eyes wise,
sorrowful, tragic.
"No," she replies, her voice low. "But ah've heard of it;
