50
PARTISAN REVIEW
I should maintain this world as a world, I suppose that I should beat
the drum. But we don't need this world in order to love, my love
doesn't need a living world, it gathers a world about it as the rain
makes slanting ties between cloudland and earth.
MARTHA. Now it is singing again and singing, the bird in my
throat like a heart beating. Now it is to come again, there's no ques–
tion now, no moment of weakness. Now my eyes are pastureland
waiting for us to lie in them, waiting for the rain.
THE TRAMP. Now I am gathered, blackened now. About to
be rain on the land I desire.
MARTHA. You did not doubt I would come to you and now I
have come. Your life is good in that it is without doubt.
THE TRAMP. Yet with you there will always be doubt, and
yet you will always answer. Instant love is part of you now, it is part
of your living; the outside woman part of you is now part of your
life." I know nothing but I understand everything, like afternoon rain
softly falling. Now you will ahvays be ready for love, that the fields
have known children's feet and falling rain. The bird will always be
in your throat, even though silent, often smaller than your heart, the
taste will always be ready on your tongue, your breasts always honey.
The two found shade toward the front of the truck, our people
living their lives. The clouds came close to the thirsty fields' horizon,
the late afternoon of a lovely day, the quietly gray dusk. Thirstily the
fields stirred, the clouds released their contents and found their desire.
The cloud and the field on the horizon of a day found thmselves
united by warm fragrant bars of rain.
Martha lay sleeping the moist sleep of early evening. The green
of her eyes was fresh under lids of darkness. The warmth of the rain
was of her, now, the quiet glad, the sleeping warmth, the slow
dis–
solving.
The tramp sat easily on the back edge of the truck, dangling
his
legs slowly, the tendernes<> was upon him although he did not sleep.
His eyes were white quiet clouds, evening-drifting. The world of
green and things in which our world is suspended is dark now with
occasional warm windows gleams. In the cab of the truck the driver
drives mechanically, the politician dreams of himself in semisleep
(they are not of our world) . Suddenly the truck passed through a
village where a carnival was starting. The lights were of the people,
their eyes, the excitement, the noise was the shouting and the bright
lights of the stalls. Young people shrieked as the ferriswheel turned, a
brilliant earthbound constellation. Suddenly the night wa<> life, the
people living. The tramp on the truck felt himself gather, into a mo–
ment (this was one of many for him) and without more recollection
