New Poems | Page 6

act this part?Of unswerving indifference to me??You want at last, ah me!?To break my heart?Evader!
You know your mouth?Was always sooner to soften?Even than your eyes.?Now shut it lies?Relentless, however often?I kiss it in drouth.
It has no breath?Nor any relaxing. Where,?Where are you, what have you done??What is this mouth of stone??How did you dare?Take cover in death!
II
Once you could see,?The white moon show like a breast revealed?By the slipping shawl of stars.?Could see the small stars tremble?As the heart beneath did wield?Systole, diastole.
All the lovely macrocosm?Was woman once to you,?Bride to your groom.?No tree in bloom?But it leaned you a new?White bosom.
And always and ever?Soft as a summering tree?Unfolds from the sky, for your good,?Unfolded womanhood;?Shedding you down as a tree?Sheds its flowers on a river.
I saw your brows?Set like rocks beside a sea of gloom,?And I shed my very soul down into your
thought;?Like flowers I fell, to be caught?On the comforted pool, like bloom?That leaves the boughs.
III
Oh, masquerader,?With a hard face white-enamelled,?What are you now??Do you care no longer how?My heart is trammelled,?Evader?
Is this you, after all,?Metallic, obdurate?With bowels of steel??Did you _never_ feel?--?Cold, insensate,?Mechanical!
Ah, no!--you multiform,?You that I loved, you wonderful,?You who darkened and shone,?You were many men in one;?But never this null?This never-warm!
Is this the sum of you??Is it all nought??Cold, metal-cold??Are you all told?Here, iron-wrought??Is _this_ what's become of you?
SEVEN SEALS
SINCE this is the last night I keep you home,?Come, I will consecrate you for the journey.
Rather I had you would not go. Nay come,?I will not again reproach you. Lie back?And let me love you a long time ere you go.?For you are sullen-hearted still, and lack?The will to love me. But even so?I will set a seal upon you from my lip,?Will set a guard of honour at each door,?Seal up each channel out of which might slip?Your love for me.
I kiss your mouth. Ah, love,?Could I but seal its ruddy, shining spring?Of passion, parch it up, destroy, remove?Its softly-stirring crimson welling-up?Of kisses! Oh, help me, God! Here at the source?I'd lie for ever drinking and drawing in?Your fountains, as heaven drinks from out their
course?The floods.
I close your ears with kisses?And seal your nostrils; and round your neck you'll
wear--?Nay, let me work--a delicate chain of kisses.?Like beads they go around, and not one misses?To touch its fellow on either side.
And there?Full mid-between the champaign of your breast?I place a great and burning seal of love?Like a dark rose, a mystery of rest?On the slow bubbling of your rhythmic heart.
Nay, I persist, and very faith shall keep?You integral to me. Each door, each mystic port?Of egress from you I will seal and steep?In perfect chrism.
Now it is done. The mort?Will sound in heaven before it is undone.
But let me finish what I have begun?And shirt you now invulnerable in the mail?Of iron kisses, kisses linked like steel.?Put greaves upon your thighs and knees, and frail?Webbing of steel on your feet. So you shall feel?Ensheathed invulnerable with me, with seven?Great seals upon your outgoings, and woven?Chain of my mystic will wrapped perfectly?Upon you, wrapped in indomitable me.
READING A LETTER
SHE sits on the recreation ground?Under an oak whose yellow buds dot the pale
blue sky.?The young grass twinkles in the wind, and the sound?Of the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy.
So sitting under the knotted canopy?Of the wind, she is lifted and carried away as in?a balloon?Across the insensible void, till she stoops to see?The sandy desert beneath her, the dreary platoon.
She knows the waste all dry beneath her, in one
place?Stirring with earth-coloured life, ever turning and
stirring.?But never the motion has a human face?Nor sound, save intermittent machinery whirring.
And so again, on the recreation ground?She alights a stranger, wondering, unused to the
scene;?Suffering at sight of the children playing around,?Hurt at the chalk-coloured tulips, and the evening
-green.
TWENTY YEARS AGO
ROUND the house were lilacs and strawberries?And foal-foots spangling the paths,?And far away on the sand-hills, dewberries?Caught dust from the sea's long swaths.
Up the wolds the woods were walking,?And nuts fell out of their hair.?At the gate the nets hung, balking?The star-lit rush of a hare.
In the autumn fields, the stubble?Tinkled the music of gleaning.?At a mother's knees, the trouble?Lost all its meaning.
Yea, what good beginnings?To this sad end!?Have we had our innings??God forfend!
INTIME
RETURNING, I find her just the same,?At just the same old delicate game.
Still she says: "Nay, loose no flame?To lick me up and do me harm!?Be all yourself!--for oh, the charm?Of your heart of fire in which I look!?Oh, better there than in any book?Glow and enact the dramas and dreams?I love for ever!--there it seems?You are lovelier than life itself, till desire?Comes licking through the bars of your lips?And over my face the stray fire slips,?Leaving a burn and an ugly smart?That will have the oil of illusion. Oh, heart?Of fire and beauty, loose no