Presumably belongs on the <Beer> page

Never a proprietor of old chess dungeons
shoos away a neophyte of Caissa's:
lodging-house etiquette is fully deserved
by a masonry as venerable as Job's.
Or set aside Caissa, patron saint of chess,
and analyze the problem with your New York eye:
first of all, these denizens have no other home;
secondly, they're stolid and so dead a weight at night, one and two and three o'clock A.M. the time they're through, he'd need a dozen wheelbarrows to cart them away;
and where would he dump them?-down an alley or a sewer?- devotees are lost if they ever touch the world;
he'd grow a silly bankrupt if he even aired them out; last of all, they're old, older than patriarchs,
older than the bible and as old as Israel;
turn them out of doors, he'd be turning out his race; a gentile "goy" might do it, but you'll never see a Jew! (If you care to test a creed,
try Grand Street off the Bowery!)

Chess players squeeze out a mite of livelihood,
squeeze each other for the stake, a nickel a game:
twelve or thirteen hours buy one's coffee, one's doughnuts; satiety this against the hunger chessdom breeds:
but-
you've got to be adroit enough and shrewd enough;
scholarship won't do; you must have imagination;
and then you'll need the third and hardest, only age can forge, courage to make the move you've felt your conceive:
but-
if you haven't got the brain to beat him, do it with your tongue; scare him from the winning coup, sneak his thought elsewhere: call him "potzer," "niebich," "kibitz";
if that trio don't confound him,
sneer him "goy"; the weird vernacular
has always this to addle Jews:
but-
if you haven't got the tongue to thwart him, do it with your beard; unless your beard is long enough though, wait until it grows; then let it wave across the field like a willow in the wind, then hover near a corner like a broom that's done its day; and when he blares "schachmatt" at you, you raise the elfin growth, disclose a rook he couldn't see which makes off with his queen, and twists the mate against him like a dagger in the dark! (You sneer me, historian?-
try Grand Street off the Bowery!)

Chess players vie in old damp basements,
till some of them have nickels and some of them have none: as long as some are still alive and only some are dead, old damp basements are chess players' homes.
When chess players die, they lay down their kings,
do it with a noble touch, if they've learned the game at all:
for "a move's a move, you can never retract,"
the mystic law from first to last, beginner up to peer! Consider cross-eyed Spielmann who resigned two dawns ago; Spielmann knew Caissa's word; he'd played her eighty years: played her as a boy when he won from Lilienkron,
played her at the close when he lost to Lilienthal;
played her through the way between from
Rosenzweig to Ziegenschwarz, Kalinski to Rabinowitz;
and more than played her on that crag, the night he beat lame Steinitz, little squatty champion for five and twenty years,
Goliath of chessdom, till David Lasker brought him down! It may have been an accident, Goliath fast asleep
from defeating all the masters and the tyros of this world- but "Spielmann once beat Steinitz!" was the epitaph that dawn as they stretched him on two tables for the first move to the grave: "a doddering duffer like Lilienthal beat Spielmann?-
Caissa, our Caissa, it was who queened that pawn!"
They dug their clinking nickels out of vests and up from trousers to dig a checkered plot for Spielmann who beat Steinitz! (No Potter's Field takes king or pawn
from Grand Street off the Bowery!)

Picture of a young Alfred Kreymborg, from the 1904 American Chess Bulletin. He's in the back row, fourth from the left, and looking very clean shaven. If I can read sideways correctly, that's J. M. Hanham seated third from the left.

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