The Last Leaf
In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy
and broken themselves into small strips called "places."
These "places" make strange angles and curves
One Street crosses itself a time or two
An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street
Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should
in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back
without a cent having been paid on account
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling
hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables
and Dutch attics and low rents
Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue
and became a "colony."
At the top of a squatty, three story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio
"Johnsy" was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California
They had met at the table of an Eighth Street Delmonico's
and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial
that the joint studio resulted
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger
whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony
touching one here and there with his icy fingers
Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly
smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze
of the narrow and moss-grown places
Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman
A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs
was hardly fair game for the red-fisted
short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay
scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead
looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, grey eyebrow
"She has one chance in - let us say, ten," he said
as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer
And that chance is for her to want to live
This way people have of lining on the side of the undertaker
makes the entire pharmacopoeia look silly
Your little lady has made up her mind that she's not going to get well
Has she anything on her mind