Classic Poem

Mist, vapour,
A little whiff of wind,
Noticed as nothing and as soon forgotten,
Such was my purpose.
It would have held, too,
No doubt of that,
And you and I no other than we were.
You would not have it so.
Your call cloaked me in the seeming of reality,
I entered, bidden, to your consciousness.
And here I stand,
Waiting, for so you will for me,
Waiting.
For what?
Would you have me like a caryatid,
Holding above your head some sheltering sky
Of softened, tempered sunlight?
Would you keep me as a gathered curio
To say: “See, this I found, and kept for luck”?
Or do you guess at possibilities,
A warmth to draw from me when nights grow cold
And gales whine bitterly in window cracks?
For myself,
I have lost recollection how I came.
Returning shows a dim, uneasy way
My feet refuse to follow.
Yet suppose,
Suppose the very custom of my long
Vacant delaying just inside the door
Blurs me to an impassive bibelot,
A bit of furniture which, neither used
Nor looked at, is most likely to be left
Totally unregarded and ignored—
My summons nothing,
A caprice outworn—
Standing forsaken in an empty room.
How the wind howls!
The fire is a red recumbent ash.
The future, strange chameleon to the drift of time,
Turns round on me a grinning pasteboard face
Dropped from a masker at a carnival.
Hola! then. I'll be harlequin and dance
In checkers of blood-red and black hearse plumes,
Capering, dead drunk, upon a coffin lid.