Explore "The Woman with the Dead Soles" by Harry Graham on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
(_After Stephen Phillips_)
Attracted to the frozen river's brink, / Where on a small impromptu snow-swept rink, / The happy skaters darted left and right, / Or circled amorously out of sight, / Some self-supporting; some, like falling stars, / Spread-eagling ankle-weak parabolas; / I watched the human swarm, and I was 'ware / A woman, disarranged, knelt on a chair. / She had cold feet on which she could not run, / And piteously she thawed them in the sun. / Those feet were of a woman that alone / Was kneeling; a pink liquid by her shone, / Which raising to her luminous, lantern jaw, / She sipped; or idly stirred it with a straw. / Upon her hat she wore a kind of fowl, / An hummingbird, I ween, or else an owl. / Then turned to me. I looked the other way, / Trembling; I knew the words she wished to say.