C. E. S. Wood
Reading edition
Charles Erskine Scott Wood was born at Erie, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1852, educated at the United States Military Academy (1874) and Columbia, where he received the degrees of Ph.B. and LL.B. in 1883. Wood served in the United States Army for almost ten years, acting as lieutenant in various campaigns against the Indians during 1877–8. He was admitted to the bar in 1884, practised at Portland, Oregon, and retired in 1919.
In 1901, he published A Book of Tales, Being Myths of the North American Indians. In 1904, his symbolic A Masque of Love appeared. His finest work, however, is The Poet in the Desert (1915), a sonorous pageant of protest from which the two selections have been taken.
SUNRISE
The lean coyote, prowler of the night,
Slips to his rocky fastnesses.
Jack-rabbits noiselessly shuttle among the sage-brush,
And, from the castellated cliffs,
54Rock-ravens launch their proud black sails upon the day.
The wild horses troop back to their pastures.
The poplar-trees watch beside the irrigation-ditches.
Orioles, whose nests sway in the cotton-wood trees by the ditch-side, begin to twitter.
All shy things, breathless, watch
The thin white skirts of dawn,
The dancer of the sky,
Who trips daintily down the mountain-side
Emptying her crystal chalice....
And a red-bird, dipped in sunrise, cracks from a poplar’s top
His exultant whip above a silver world.
THE DESERT
She is a nun, withdrawing behind her veil;
Grey, mysterious, meditative, unapproachable.
Her body is tawny with the eagerness of the Sun
And her eyes are pools which shine in deep canyons.
She is a beautiful swart woman
With opals at her throat,
Rubies at her wrists
And topaz about her ankles.
Her breasts are like the evening and the day stars.
She sits upon her throne of light, proud and silent,
Indifferent to wooers.
The Sun is her servitor, the stars her attendants,
Running before her.
She sings a song unto her own ears,
55Solitary but sufficient;
The song of her being.
She is a naked dancer, dancing upon
A pavement of porphyry and pearl,
Dazzling, so that the eyes must be shaded.
She wears the stars upon her bosom
And braids her hair with the constellations.