Page:The man against the sky; a book of poems.djvu/90

 "An hour among the ghosts will do no harm." He laughed, and something glad within me sank. I may have eyed him with a faint alarm, For now his laugh was lost in what he drank.

"They chill things here with ice from hell," he said; "I might have known it." And he made a face That showed again how much of him was dead, And how much was alive and out of place,

And out of reach. He knew as well as I That all the words of wise men who are skilled In using them are not much to defy What comes when memory meets the unfulfilled.

What evil and infirm perversity Had been at work with him to bring him back? Never among the ghosts, assuredly, Would he originate a new attack;