<A P. JOHNSON>
<T Night & Silence>
<P 1>
<C i>
DEAR OLD DR. PARKE
Under the maples, burning like bonfires, pure yellow
and pure red, walked Dr. Dominick Maudlin Parke,
his hands clasped behind his back.
The day was mild. The sky, behind the flagrant leaves, was
almost white, almost as white as the hair of Dr. Parke, dear
<1old>1 Dr. Parke, though no more than fifty-seven years of age,
who walked in generally admired perplexity, though he was
not perplexed at all.
He knew precisely, as he had always known, what he had to
do.
He had to welcome, at 4 p.m. on the dot, the latest and last
of the Visiting Fellows.
His soft shoes trod soft leaves, amazingly coloured, though
his eyes had long ceased to heed them. The scarlet maple
leaf, when turned on to its backside, becomes the most fragile
of mauves, rose-mauve, tender as the word Mauve or as the
flesh of an odalisque in shadow on a couch of crimson plush:
such flesh Dr. Parke trod all unseeing, but all-knowing.
Any old how, such was his re . . .
