Lines 609-614:  Nor can one help, etc.

This passage is different in the draft:

609      Nor can one help the exile caught by death

In a chance inn exposed to the hot breath

Of this America, this humid night:

Through slatted blinds the stripes of colored light

Grope for his bed—magicians from the past

With philtered gems—and life is ebbing fast.

This describes rather well the “chance inn,” a log cabin, with a tiled bathroom, where I am trying to coordinate these notes.  At first I was greatly bothered by the blare of diabolical radio music from what I thought was some kind of amusement park across the road—it turned out to be camping tourists—and I was thinking of moving to another place, when they forestalled me.  Now it is quieter, except for an irritating wind rattling through the withered aspens, and Cedarn is again a ghost town, and there are no summer fools or spies to stare at me, and my little blue-jeaned fisherman no longer stands on his stone in the stream, and perhaps it is better so.