Long, black, asleep. Dreaming. A blacknuss man. A jazzman. He does not make music, but he listens. He does make causes, but he listens. A blacknuss man. Feeling that new black world a coming, its women, its bright new cleanliness, through the music. He had awakened and hugged her, this small black southern girl with whom he found himself enchanted. She was having a bad dream, and now it visits him.

He is dreaming of his music, and his woman. But they have painted a devastating picture with this music-madness. He stands back, insulted and fearful. He searches in the ballooning sound, the avalanche of sounds, for his beloved. But she appears in no form he can recognize.

It has not been the hard desperate struggle some foresaw, to teach the quiet gentle man to hate the Greeks. He knew, inside, that the world is all polarities anyway: and now opposed to his brown tenderness, they are the source of all cruelty, the children-eaters, mother-rapists; the source of all fiercely burning cruelty. Why then, are his adored teachers sending her back to him this way?

A long corridor with locked doors.

One knocks:--the echo--the silence.

The polite refusal--the silence.

Again the lonely corridor,

The fading to two dimensions,

The ramming of one's forehead

Against a paper wall.

Each has his reserves,

Rooms of no admission.

(Whether mystery here,

Or sorrow, or dignity, or just death...

What knowledge of such secrets?)