CATALOG OF DREAMS
A Story

The clock, tick-tock, the clock, tick-tock,
Is slow to go, is slow to go.
Her creeping pen, scratch-scratch, scratch-scratch,
Till almost ten scrapes on, and then
The clicking of the noisy latch.

These streets of sooty rain-storms, blurred and mean,
Of chilled old men who blearily pass the door
Of this branch library squatterly set between
A laundry and a delicatessen store.

The night librarian: no demands, no pride;
Merely a pleasant spinster, anxious, kind;
This relic of New York's West Upper Side,
Born here, no doubt to die here, all resigned.

Lucy Cotton, in black overall,
Making a catalog of books on dreams;
The books of Freud; repressions, fears, and all;
And cloudy-spectacled Germans' cloudy gleams.

But with the plodding exactitudes of Berlin
Lucy perversely catalogs the mood
Of drug-drowsed Coleridge; and a Dream of Merlin:
Stormy enchantments in a misty wood.

But even of dreams and magic she grows weary,
In this quiet reading-room, so stark alone.
The night is stormy, pitilessly dreary,
The wind's grief only, not even a cheery phone.
Not even a paper-rustling tramp has come
To liven the silence with his whisky hum.
Tick-tock the clock till ears and tears are numb.

Then into the room, a blast from the storm-wind blowing,
A gust of a revolutionary storm,
A collegian, hatless, rough hair wildly growing,
With mouth atremble but eager eyes and warm.

He is shouting, before he scarce has crossed the sill,
"Miss Cotton! I've got another poem for you!
Read it, please read it, if you only will,
And tell me, Miss Cotton, if it's deep and new.
This is no Tennyson! I have tried to catch
The enduring things behind the kill and snatch.
Please read it!"

Catalog of Dreams....2

#

Glad to be wanted, Lucy Cotton read
The chaotic lines that limped and groped and bled.

## unhurried heart

jet plane's crystallized thunder
feels pulse of circumnavigating globe
times and adjust to that rhythmtime in equilibriurn
so slow unmoving as inness of that fast
no exceeding and no retard
fixed as the needle
so speeding in torpor of your unhurried heart
in equal forever its discelerity
warmth born and atilt of just celerity
enduring as truetimed truetimed truetimed

What it all meant, this foggy Modern Verse,
The judicious Lucy Cotton never knew.
It seemed to mean: love must deep in love immerse.
And that was to her a sound and cheery view.
Gently she pats the boy's hand, and she sighs,
"It's fine, Max, fine -- too fine for my stupid eyes!"

## II

A dozen red-brick houses in a row,
Dusty and streaked and all on the same grim plan,
High-stooped and thin, with limestone placques like dough.
Lucy's father, a harmless dry-goods man,
Left her this one house; in it she was born,
Thirty-five years ago, on Easter morn.
It is her only home, her only wealth.
Most of the rooms she rents, with doubt and scorn,
To lodgers, creatures given to noise and stealth.

Her own room is a spinster's treasure heap,
Smelling of balsam pillows and cleanliness:
Snapshots of all her family, long asleep,
Old dance-cards, and her mother's wedding-dress
And artificial roses in a vase;
A room as repressed and wistful as her face,
Yet after her evening's work a font of grace.

Catalog of Dreams...3

#

She strips to a slip of sheer surprising silk
With a froth of fragile lace about her breast.
Then brews a witch-broth -- cinnamon and milk,
Egg-white and sugar, the strongest rum and best.

She tears off her slip; she stands before her glass
Naked, deep-blushing, and strokes her arms and thighs;
Dons a black rayon nightgown and beads of brass,
And round them a robe of flaming Orient dyes.

She hastens out to the hall in new red shoes
And recklessly climbs the stairs to the attic floor,
Bearing the draft that from pirate rum she brews,
And tap-taps lightly on a grained pine door.

She marches in grandly, like a gay young queen
Greeting her lover with a tossing head.
A man of forty, sad and dark and lean,
Lies restlessly resting on a wide brown bed.

Guido D'Argenti, teacher of Latin, Greek,
And the antique melody of Italian;
A crippled soul who smiles and tries to speak;
Fire masked with ashes in a broken man.

"Lucy, I missed you so, all evening long,
While the wind kept jeering, and I was alone and cold.
What did you do tonight in your courtly throng?
Was there music and love and adventure high and bold?"

"Yes! There was passion, very bold and high.
Seventy emperors came from seventy ships.
(Drink the punch, Guido dearest. Oh yes, try!
They brought me a golden coffer of paper clips!)

"That crazy youngster, Max, came out of the fog
With another poem sewed with crooked seams.
I reviewed our Italian lessons, reams and reams,
And sat like a spider and spun a catalog
Of books about the psychology of dreams."

"Oh Lucy, not those professors' burrowing noses!
We must have dreams, with dreamers who dare to rhyme;
Not Graphs and Cases, but swords and bawdy roses:
Dreamers who dreamed the golden olden time:

Catalog of Dreams...5

#

"In plots for freedom that they sought his life.
He fled the assassins, leaped his castle wall,
Came to America with his desolate wife
And his only son, my father, young and tall.

"I've never seen granddad, never Italy,
Always too poor to venture there and see.
And the Austrians burned our castle zealously
And sold the land. It can never belong to me."

Guide! A
"But really, a story-book castle? Oh, my dear,
Let's keep it ours, in our fancy, moat and towers!"
She turned with a kiss half ecstasy, half fear.
They lay in a warm sweet drowsiness for hours.

II II

Languidly thinking of once more spacious days,
Sharing them with her, he talked of the ruined hall.
He had no picture; had only a homesick haze
From the boyhood stories that he could recall.

"I think that the castle had some circumstance,
But nothing magnificent; small and strong and old;
A fortified manor, not without romance --
I know of it only what my father told.

"The castle beamed in the sun, looked sweetly down
On a dipping panorama of Tuscan hills
From Argentinino, a huddled hilltop town.
Five hundred years ago there crossed its sills,

"So family tradition says, great men to be:
Savonarola, the mystic Botticelli,
Ficino the Hellenist, Giulio Medici,
Da Vinci and sometimes the silent Machiavelli,
Boccaccio the merry, Michelangelo,
And Pico himself, for a blazing month or so."

"Oh, Guido! If we but had the castle, we!
If it were busy and strong and whole again!
We'd keep it alive, and full of the sober glee
Of poets and clowns and bearded learned men.

Catalog of Dreams....6

#

"Great-hearted dreamers - not some fevered Max.
We'd talk through the nights there till the shadowy lawn
Was dappled with Guido! You're very tired! Relax.
Dearest, drop off to sleep now. See, I've gone,
With only a lullaby for you at dawn:

"Walker through the moon's deceiving,
Talker through the haunted light,
Dawn has come, to lovers' grieving,
Voyager of the dark -- good-night!"

It was the last of their long enchanted nights.
Guido was ruthlessly caught by the giant Pain,
And one by one the quietly flickering lights
Of his plucky and steadfast soul went out again.

Lucy took care of him, desperate and afraid;
Got leave from her work and bathed him, cooked for him.
Her thin strong hands she arched as a luminous shade
To shelter that flame so tremulous and so dim.

She did not know what the snooping lodgers thought.
She had never wanted a wifehood, strait and tame.
But Guido, concerned for her, anxiously now besought
Her to marry him and - they smiled - to "save her name."

They were shriven and wed, between medicine doses and broth,
And gave up the marital freedom they both held dear.
The priest was a busy and affable man of the cloth.
The guests were librarian friends with their handkerchiefs near....
She was Mrs. D'Argenti, or Baroness, as she chose,
Though she never would own to a title®, Heaven knows!

But he was her husband for only a day and a week.
She sat holding his hand while he stared at the blankness to come,
Bound to the earth by his love, yet too distant to speak.
Slowly he turned to her, murmured, "Dear wife!" and was dumb.

The funeral of the city poor,
In our age of gasoline,
Is never slow and never dour,
But shiny as a new machine.
A black but splendid limousine
With one lone mourner, stupified,
And a motor hearse like a costly bride
Speed forty cheerful miles an hour
Toward a niche in a modern Burial Bower,
Where patent chilled-steel doors exclude
Love's out-of-date beatitude.

Catalog of Dreams...7

VI

She could not feel his presence at that tomb.
At home she sought it, sometimes found it there,
But fitful and pitiful, in his empty room.
Sometimes she heard his ghost walk up the stair.

She listened for him, rigid and stark afraid.
She moved all her treasures up to Guido's lair,
Lived on the cold scraps of a sad old maid,
Wearily nibbled them in his favorite chair.

And then she was rich! She was Mrs. D'Argenti, heiress!
She could travel abroad - with economical trippers;
She could split a whole week between London, Holland and Paris.
And buy one dress and a pair of golden slippers!

Guido had left her, it seems, in a will just found,
Two thousand dollars, spoils of his railroad smash;
She had forty thousand or so in this house and ground,
And she'd patiently saved an astounding thousand, cash.

She'd go to him now, she vowed, and find release;
She would seek the D'Argenti castle ruins; there
His spirit must hover, and find a decent peace
In the Italy longed for in his last despair.

Though the Austrians burned it, there would still be left
The castle's wreckage, as shrine for Guido's soul,
Its mighty towers, scorched and scarred and cleft;
A majestic tomb for his majestic goal.

She asked for leave at the library; they said No.
"You've taken one leave, my dear, to nurse your man.
Be sensible, dear!" She nodded, set to go,
To sacrifice every reasonable plan
And to barter Ben Franklin for the Great God Pan.

"I think I'll visit Europe for thirty days," She said to a teacher of substance and of tea. " Splendid! The Culture might get you a lovely raise! It's a joy-ride; take it this summer, Luce!" said she.

"But do it right; enroll in Streamline Tours,  
Not go round loose, to please some fancied need.  
The Streamline leaders forbid such doubtful lures  
And take you where Culture is timed and guaranteed.

Catalog of Dreams...9

VII.

Green Genoa hills enclosed a vasty bowl
Which she stared at thirstily from the steamer's bow,
Whispering, "Look in my heart and you shall see
Written inside of it: Italy." Italy!

Dream of her Guido, dream of her widowed soul --
She could not believe. Was she really in Italy now?

The long blue 'bus to Livorno and Volterra,
Then a rickety truck, with chicken crates atop,
Up the mountain trails that slash the high sierra
To Argentinino and her pious stop.

She saw it afar, as fresh as a fairy story,
Perched on a hill, incredibly high in air,
Romantic and secret, glazed with a special glory.

There would surely be fountains, a glittering, chattering square.

The Italian she'd learned from Guido was not too bad.
She talked to the driver, exultant and gaily mad --
And made herself scoff at a growing and menacing pall....
She could see no castle, no lofty towers at all.

Argentinino. Lost in a dreary doze;
A barren piazza, like a lava tomb;
Never a tree, a fountain, a generous rose.
Children and lean cats, dumb in a listening gloom,
And the only café a stifling and littered room.

And, looking forlornly up the climbing street,
No castle, no splendor. A watch-tower, a barn, and the huts
Of vineyards barren and gray as November sleet.
The end of her trail, and an end with muddy ruts.

"Castel D'Argenti -- but where are its towers, you boys?"
The piazza loafers all grunt with a slow surprise.
They stare at this tourist: the ignorant sort that annoys
Intelligent people by asking fool questions. One wise
Supercilious urchin answers her, "Up in the skies,
Or down in Hell, maybe, or maybe in France or Algier.
Never heard of no castles, no Gent's, no sightseers here!"

"Then where's an albergo, boys? Where is the inn - the hotel?"
They blink with dismay at each other, commencing to grin.
One cackles, "There ain't none - unless it is also in Hell.
In Argentinino there's nobody heard of an inn!

"Signora Puttini, the wife of the butcher, has rooms."
The disconsolate Lucy says feebly, "What kind of a place?
Is it clean?" They guffaw and a bearded old villager booms,
"Signora Puttini's a woman of virtue and grace
Who has made for St. Vincent's a hanging of velvet and lace."

Catalog of Dreams....10

#

Five youngsters escort her and carry her modest valise,
Her camera, lunch box, and *How to see Italy Cheap*,
Her thrifty umbrella, and *Tuscan Relations to Greece*
To the virtuous house where she gloomily hopes she may sleep.

A gnome of a house, with stone walls and the floors all of stone,
With a candle-bright shine in the plastered and dark-raftered room.
Clean enough, kind enough, safe for a woman alone,
She might find it a friendly, might find it a neighborly place.

Yes. Mrs. Puttini could rent her a beautiful bed,
If she didn't mind sharing the bed with her girls, who slept light.
Reluctant yet forced to it, Lucy unhappily said
She'd try it -- she'd only be here, at the most, for a night.

No. Mrs. Puttini had never heard tell of D'Argenti.
She thought there had once been a castle; she didn't quite know....
They'd have supper at seven, with tagliatelli aplenty,
And at nine her sweet girls and the guest would all sleep in a row.

VIII.

She climbed a steep lung-racking lane to the lofty plateau.
She saw Guido's vista of valley and shadowy plain
From the farmhouse, once army hut, long and tar-shingled and low,
With a courtyard where fluttering pigeons were pecking at grain.

The barn was an ancient hulk built out of ponderous stone,
With time-silvered oak doors and hinges of iron hand-wrought,
Near a watch-tower, once outpost defending the Florentine zone,
Mossy and sullen; a relic of battles long fought.

The farmer, a dreary and slow-spoken wreck of a peasant,
Knew nothing at all of the past of the barn and the tower.
He came from Arezzo, where folks were more helpful and pleasant.
He'd like to be back there, at Moko's Cafe, for an hour!
D'Argenti? A castle? Such wonders had never been here.
Some other villaggio perhaps, but not any too near.

Cold desolation. She saw there was no castle here.
Perhaps the cold Habsburger tyrant, in murderous shame
So wiped out the castle, the family, and all in their sphere,
That no one was left now to honor their fire-gutted name.