When he awoke, the bolt of light that he fallen asleep under had swung through the wall and disappeared and the world was dark, and felt tense, as if ashamed, and as if bristling to retort at some unexpected effrontery. He sat up and saw his blue chest tangled with dark hair. It seemed to him that this hair growing out of him might feel itself more living than he did, though perhaps in a smaller way.

"The earth might think that of its issue," so he thought;
"The tangled little lives it quickened and forgot.
Forgot, though those whose lives these are forget them not
They, with neither dread nor consequence, forgotten, rot.
And if so, what sudden seems to earth, to them seems slow
And slow enough to grateful be, and debts invent to owe.

To owe the giver of a gift he never gave!
But if the debt we owe we ever paid,
Would he recognize the child he had made?
Would, in fact, we look alike in form or face?
Might the image, raised from clay, on clay be based?
From dust to dust, and meantime, dust; the human race?

Cruel miracle is birth bethinking us we've souls to save
When in whose image we were made's our muddy grave!"


His chest hair! He brushed it back and forth and laughed and rose to bathe.