10
Sleepless, breathing the black air, he heard footsteps along the
        street,
and click—the street-lamp was out;
darkness jumped like a black cat upon his chest.

Dawn: the window became grey,
the bed-clothes were lit up and his sleeping wife’s head,
as if the darkness had melted into that heap of loose hair.

Soon her eyes would open, disks of light blue, strange in a
        Jewess.
He would turn away; the eyes would look curiously, the way
        they had been looking for months,
how are you getting on? still not doing well?
And her left hand would raise itself slowly and pull on the 
        lobe of her left ear;
and her eyes shine with a slight pity, the way a woman looks
        at a mouse in a trap.
No longer the calm look with which she had greeted him,
when he was chief clerk in a store in that Russian town
which he now carried about like picture postal-cards in a
        pocket,
the town where he had shone in the light of the big store.

Day: the noise of splashing water, his children in underwear
        thudding about with bare feet,
pulling on clothes in a hurry and bending over to lace shoes.
Soon the door would close, again and again, all would be
        gone,
the elder to shops, the younger ones to school.
For these he had come to America that they might study and
        the boys be free from army service,
to lift and spread them as he had been doing, boughs of
        himself, the trunk.
Now the elder were going to work and could study only at
        night,
snipping bits for years, perhaps ten or more, to make their
        patched learning,
and pooling wages to buy food and lodging for the younger
        children, his wife, and himself.
He could only bring them food from the kitchen,
or run downstairs to the grocer’s for pickles or a bottle of
        ketchup—
to make life tastier,
to try to stick hairs in the hide of life and make it a fur to wrap
        them snug.
Forty years in a store where business was done leisurely over
        glasses of tea,
and now to walk the streets and meet men hasty and abrupt,
between tenements and their barrels heaped with ashes and
        garbage.
Younger relatives now excused themselves after a few words
and hurried into the noise of their shops to some matter of
        their own.
If only his business were not a flower-pot into which he had
        spilled his savings
day by day carefully and had spilled loans—
and nothing came up from the black earth.

The day was the first warm day of spring.
The sunlight through the windowpanes fell in large living
        oblongs on the floor.
He opened a window; the air blew in, warm and fragrant.
The sunlight fell on his shoes, cracked and gaping, his faded
        trousers, the bottoms frayed.

In winter, when rain drummed sullen marches on pavement
        and windowpanes,
or the streets were heaped with snow turning black,
his own music was sung and his despair imaged.
Now he was forgotten—easily, like the thought of somebody
        else’s sorrow.
The yards and fire-escapes were glinting with sunlight, and the
        tall fences,
dirtied by rain, their rows of nails on top bleeding rust.

Women were opening windows and shaking out clothes,
his own wife had gone to the grocer’s or butcher’s, his children
        were at work or school;
only he was useless, like an old pot left in the kitchen for a
        while.

He pulled down the window-blind and laid himself near the
        stove.
He folded his coat under his head, over the floor’s hardness.
The pour of gas sickened him, he was half-minded to pull the
        rubber tube out of his mouth;
but he felt dizzy, too weak to move.