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The Thin People

They are always with us, the thin people
Meager of dimension as the gray people
 
On a movie—screen. They
Are unreal, we say:
 
It was only in a movie, it was only
In a war making evil headlines when we
 
Were small that they famished and
Grew so lean and would not round
 
Out their stalky limbs again though peace
Plumped the bellies of the mice
 
Under the meanest table.
It was during the long hunger—battle
 
They found their talent to persevere
In thinness, to come, later,
 
Into our bad dreams, their menace
Not guns, not abuses,
 
But a thin silence.
Wrapped in flea—ridded donkey skins,
 
Empty of complaint, forever
Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore
 
The insufferable nimbus of the lot—drawn
Scapegoat. But so thin,
 
So weedy a race could not remain in dreams,
Could not remain outlandish victims
 
In the contracted country of the head
Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could
 
Keep from cutting fat meat
Out of the side of the generous moon when it
 
Set foot nightly in her yard
Until her knife had pared
 
The moon to a rind of little light.
Now the thin people do not obliterate
 
Themselves as the dawn
Grayness blues, reddens, and the outline
 
Of the world comes clear and fills with color.
They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper
 
Frieze of cabbage—roses and cornflowers pales
Under their thin—lipped smiles,
 
Their withering kingship.
How they prop each other up!
 
We own no wilderness rich and deep enough
For stronghold against their stiff
 
Battalions. See, how the tree boles flatten
And lose their good browns
 
If the thin people simply stand in the forest,
Making the world go thin as a wasp’s nest
 
And grayer; not even moving their bones.
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