Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Mist

Isidor Schneider

IS death a mist

In which life becomes invisible?

Yesterday

The world ended in mist.

It lay shrunken by immobility

Into a gray coffin.

The steeple rose,

Prodded and pricked the mist

Like a question

Investigating doubt.

Its dim spire

Found the horizon new arranged

In stories.

The world became strange,

Ungrateful

Of the jagged lights

That seamed its veils.

To me, walking,

The long road unravelled

A guiding string;

And my eyes

Carried before and behind

Its constant small visibility.

I faced the mist-made microcosm—

Where pebbles are boulders,

Puddles lakes,

Sidewalk-cracks long chasms,

The curb a precipice;

Where towers flew,

Roofs floated like rafts;

And smoke wreaths

Were like dark veins

Under a skin.

Is death a mist

In which life becomes invisible?