In Harness

By Lola Ridge

I The foreman's head slowly circling... White rims under yellow disks of eyes.... Gold hairs starting out of a blond scowl... Hovering... disappearing... recurring... the foreman's head. Droning of power-machines... droning of girl with adenoids... Arms flapping with a fin-like motion under sun burning down through a sky-light like a glass lid. Light skating on the rims of wheels... boring in gimlet points. Needles flickering fierce white threads of light fine as a wasp's sting. Light in sweat-drops brighter than eyes and calico-pallid faces and bodies throwing off smells - and the air a bloated presence pressing on the walls and the silence a compressed scream. Allons enfants de la patrie - Electric... piercing... shrill as a fife the voice of a little Russian breaks out of the shivered circle. Another voice rises... another and another leaps like flame to flame. And life - surging, clamorous, swarming like a rabble crazily fluttering ragged petticoats - comes rushing back into torpid eyes like suddenly yielded gates. The girl with adenoids rocks on her hams. A torrent of song strains at her throat, gurgles, rushes, gouges her blocked pipes. Her feet beat a wild tattoo - head flung back and pelvis lifting to the white body of the sun. Mates now, these two - goddess and god.... Marchons! Only the power machines drone with metallic docility under the flaxen head of the foreman poised like an amazed gull. II To-day little French merchant men with pointed beards and fat American merchant men without any beards drive to a feast of buttered squabs. The band... accoutered and neatly caparisoned... plays the Marseillaise.... And I think of a wild stallion... newly caught... flanks yet taut and nostrils spread to the smell of a racing mare, hitched to a grocer's cart.