Oracular

Over the honored bones of Boston (resting, as we say) old leaves’ bones underfoot are restless; and boys and schoolgirls going home splash through them, reciting alphabet lately received. They run the known, intone the unsure patterns, repeat the magic, nearly Grecian syllables; and little winds are winding up their strident lmno, R, S, T. She was no snowy witch, but young and turning, a mother-dear more dear now incipiently frosty; witches most live when she died, October; primly colonial, Mother Goose’s grave; who did not rhyme or gather the pages vainly: what mantic abc’s she told she dared make charming only to spell her children’s moral lives. The children passing sing the future, certainly, but knowing nothing (as the lore requires) and recommending nothing as they are merely oracles spelling their letters’ lives, not telling theirs. They have their own games not of the elder nation; certain cobwebs accommodate the young, and special weeds; and these who chant now know no gentle Sibylla but many seemingly answering leaves. What there will be of signs, of sounds so flighty and so friable, the letters as the leaves, boys and girls as letters, and of late Boston’s honorable cinders, laid quietly and always restless: maybe a daisy, my dears, or a white carnation, or only an unanswerable tenderness.