New Poems | Page 7

more?Your reptile flames of lust; ah, store?Your passion in the basket of your soul,?Be all yourself, one bonny, burning coal?That stays with steady joy of its own fire.?But do not seek to take me by desire.?Oh, do not seek to thrust on me your fire!?For in the firing all my porcelain?Of flesh does crackle and shiver and break in pain,?My ivory and marble black with stain,?My veil of sensitive mystery rent in twain,?My altars sullied, I, bereft, remain?A priestess execrable, taken in vain--"
So the refrain?Sings itself over, and so the game?Re-starts itself wherein I am kept?Like a glowing brazier faintly blue of flame?So that the delicate love-adept?Can warm her hands and invite her soul,?Sprinkling incense and salt of words?And kisses pale, and sipping the toll?Of incense-smoke that rises like birds.
Yet I've forgotten in playing this game,?Things I have known that shall have no name;?Forgetting the place from which I came?I watch her ward away the flame,?Yet warm herself at the fire--then blame?Me that I flicker in the basket;?Me that I glow not with content?To have my substance so subtly spent;?Me that I interrupt her game.?I ought to be proud that she should ask it?Of me to be her fire-opal--.
It is well?Since I am here for so short a spell?Not to interrupt her?--Why should I?Break in by making any reply!
TWO WIVES
I
INTO the shadow-white chamber silts the white?Flux of another dawn. The wind that all night?Long has waited restless, suddenly wafts?A whirl like snow from the plum-trees and the pear,?Till petals heaped between the window-shafts
In a drift die there.
A nurse in white, at the dawning, flower-foamed
pane?Draws down the blinds, whose shadows scarcely
stain?The white rugs on the floor, nor the silent bed?That rides the room like a frozen berg, its crest?Finally ridged with the austere line of the dead
Stretched out at rest.
Less than a year the fourfold feet had pressed?The peaceful floor, when fell the sword on their rest.?Yet soon, too soon, she had him home again?With wounds between them, and suffering like a
guest?That will not go. Now suddenly going, the pain
Leaves an empty breast.
II
A tall woman, with her long white gown aflow?As she strode her limbs amongst it, once more?She hastened towards the room. Did she know?As she listened in silence outside the silent door??Entering, she saw him in outline, raised on a pyre
Awaiting the fire.
Upraised on the bed, with feet erect as a bow,?Like the prow of a boat, his head laid back like the
stern?Of a ship that stands in a shadowy sea of snow?With frozen rigging, she saw him; she drooped like
a fern?Refolding, she slipped to the floor as a ghost-white
peony slips
When the thread clips.
Soft she lay as a shed flower fallen, nor heard?The ominous entry, nor saw the other love,?The dark, the grave-eyed mistress who thus dared?At such an hour to lay her claim, above?A stricken wife, so sunk in oblivion, bowed
With misery, no more proud.
III
The stranger's hair was shorn like a lad's dark poll?And pale her ivory face: her eyes would fail?In silence when she looked: for all the whole?Darkness of failure was in them, without avail.?Dark in indomitable failure, she who had lost
Now claimed the host,
She softly passed the sorrowful flower shed?In blonde and white on the floor, nor even turned?Her head aside, but straight towards the bed?Moved with slow feet, and her eyes' flame steadily
burned.?She looked at him as he lay with banded cheek,
And she started to speak
Softly: "I knew it would come to this," she said,?"I knew that some day, soon, I should find you thus.?So I did not fight you. You went your way instead?Of coming mine--and of the two of us?I died the first, I, in the after-life
Am now your wife."
IV
"'Twas I whose fingers did draw up the young?Plant of your body: to me you looked e'er sprung?The secret of the moon within your eyes!?My mouth you met before your fine red mouth?Was set to song--and never your song denies
My love, till you went south."
"'Twas I who placed the bloom of manhood on?Your youthful smoothness: I fleeced where fleece
was none?Your fervent limbs with flickers and tendrils of new?Knowledge; I set your heart to its stronger beat;?I put my strength upon you, and I threw
My life at your feet."
"But I whom the years had reared to be your bride,?Who for years was sun for your shivering, shade for
your sweat,?Who for one strange year was as a bride to you--you
set me aside?With all the old, sweet things of our youth;--and
never yet?Have I ceased to grieve that I was not great enough
To defeat your baser stuff."
V
"But you are given back again to me?Who have kept intact for you your virginity.?Who for the rest of life walk out of care,?Indifferent here of myself, since I am gone?Where you are gone, and you and I out there
Walk now as one."
"Your widow am I, and only I. I dream?God