Book, The Ghost in the Underblows by Alfred Young Fisher

This is a Book. It was designed by Alvin Lustig. It is dated 1940 and we acquired it in 1993. Its medium is lithography in orange and black ink on off-white wove paper. It is a part of the Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design department.

This object was donated by Tamar Cohen. It is credited Gift of Tamar Cohen and Dave Slatoff.

Its dimensions are

H x W: 23.9 x 31.5 cm (9 7/16 x 12 3/8 in.)

It is inscribed

Printed in black ink, left: And a disquieted old man, covered in a robe./His face was old as any face that/Has died, remembering life./He trembled in his speech until I might have thought/It was not he but my frosty breath and the smoke/Taking the form of speech in the air./I do not know what he really said to this day,/Nor what the face of the god who did not speak was like./But I recall the face of the woman/Bent over the coals, poking the fire/With moist stick torn from a projecting rock./She looked the crafty sister plaining money./The sides of the pit were in faint glow/And one might have said the earth crawled/As does the sea, underneath the still surface./I think that I was assured, for I went away,/Took off the sack from my cold shoulders/And sat before the dying fire on my hearth./But sometime during the night/I felt a draught again, and went searching the house/For a leaky sill or an opened door./I found nothing; moreover, there was no wind./But there was once more under my still heart/Bending, the face of the old woman,/The face of the god and the face of the old man./Like something seen through the water they wavered,/Leering upward. The fire had died/And I knew no more from the night/Than I knew before fear had settled down round my head like hair./So I seized the sack, wrapped once more my shoulders/And returned to the pit; there was nothing there/Not even a burnt-out coal; but I saw/Over my head the coals of heaven glowing through the frost/And a kind of luminous smoke that trails/From one end to the other of the sky,/And thought I heard voices in the heaven/198.

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