Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 8

whole stands
writ,
Sealed with the Bishop's signet, as you know),
Once for each
person of the Blessed Three--
A miracle that the whole town attests,

The very babes thrust forward for my blessing,
And either parish
plotting for my bones--
Since this you know: sit near and bear with
me.
I have lain here, these many empty days
I thought to pack with
Credos and Hail Marys
So close that not a fear should force the
door--
But still, between the blessed syllables
That taper up like
blazing angel heads,
Praise over praise, to the Unutterable,
Strange
questions clutch me, thrusting fiery arms,
As though, athwart the
close-meshed litanies,
My dead should pluck at me from hell, with
eyes
Alive in their obliterated faces! . . .
I have tried the saints'
names and our blessed Mother's
Fra Paolo, I have tried them o'er and
o'er,
And like a blade bent backward at first thrust
They yield and
fail me--and the questions stay.
And so I thought, into some human
heart,
Pure, and yet foot-worn with the tread of sin,
If only I might
creep for sanctuary,
It might be that those eyes would let me rest. . .
Fra Paolo, listen. How should I forget

The day I saw him first? (You

know the one.)
I had been laughing in the market-place
With others
like me, I the youngest there,
Jostling about a pack of mountebanks

Like flies on carrion (I the youngest there!),
Till darkness fell; and
while the other girls
Turned this way, that way, as perdition beckoned,

I, wondering what the night would bring, half hoping:
If not, this
once, a child's sleep in my garret,
At least enough to buy that
two-pronged coral
The others covet 'gainst the evil eye,
Since, after
all, one sees that I'm the youngest--
So, muttering my litany to hell

(The only prayer I knew that was not Latin),
Felt on my arm a touch
as kind as yours,
And heard a voice as kind as yours say "Come."
I
turned and went; and from that day I never
Looked on the face of any
other man.
So much is known; so much effaced; the sin
Cast like a
plague-struck body to the sea,
Deep, deep into the unfathomable
pardon--
(The Head bowed thrice, as the whole town attests).
What
more, then? To what purpose? Bear with me!--
It seems that he, a stranger in the place,
First noted me that afternoon
and wondered:
How grew so white a bud in such black slime,
And
why not mine the hand to pluck it out?
Why, so Christ deals with
souls, you cry--what then?
Not so! Not so! When Christ, the heavenly
gardener,
Plucks flowers for Paradise (do I not know?),
He snaps
the stem above the root, and presses
The ransomed soul between two
convent walls,
A lifeless blossom in the Book of Life.
But when my
lover gathered me, he lifted
Stem, root and all--ay, and the clinging
mud--
And set me on his sill to spread and bloom
After the
common way, take sun and rain,
And make a patch of brightness for
the street,
Though raised above rough fingers--so you make
A weed
a flower, and others, passing, think:
"Next ditch I cross, I'll lift a root
from it,
And dress my window" . . . and the blessing spreads.
Well,
so I grew, with every root and tendril
Grappling the secret anchorage
of his love,
And so we loved each other till he died. . . .
Ah, that black night he left me, that dead dawn
I found him lying in

the woods, alive
To gasp my name out and his life-blood with it,
As
though the murderer's knife had probed for me
In his hacked breast
and found me in each wound. . .
Well, it was there Christ came to me,
you know,
And led me home--just as that other led me.
_(Just as
that other?_ Father, bear with me!)
My lover's death, they tell me,
saved my soul,
And I have lived to be a light to men.
And gather
sinners to the knees of grace.
All this, you say, the Bishop's signet
covers.
But stay! Suppose my lover had not died?
(At last my
question! Father, help me face it.)
I say: Suppose my lover had not
died--
Think you I ever would have left him living,
Even to be
Christ's blessed Margaret?
--We lived in sin? Why, to the sin I died to

That other was as Paradise, when God
Walks there at eventide, the
air pure gold,
And angels treading all the grass to flowers!
He was
my Christ--he led me out of hell--
He died to save me (so your
casuists say!)--
Could Christ do more? Your Christ out-pity mine?

Why, yours but let the sinner bathe His feet;
Mine raised her to the
level of his heart. . .
And then Christ's way is saving, as man's way

Is squandering--and the devil take the shards!
But this man kept for
sacramental use
The cup that once had slaked a passing thirst;
This
man declared: "The same clay serves to model
A devil or a saint; the
scribe may stain
The same fair parchment with obscenities,
Or gild
with benedictions; nay," he cried,
"Because a satyr feasted in this
wood,
And fouled the grasses with carousing foot,
Shall not a
hermit build