Precipitations | Page 8

was given you but those impalpable threads.
Yet you have bound the race,?Stranglers,?With your silver spun mysteries.?All the cruel,?All the mad,?The foolish,?And the beautiful, too:?It all belongs to you?Since the first time?That you began to drop the filmy threads?When the world was half asleep.
Sometimes you are young girls;?Sometimes there are roses in your hair.?But I know you--?Sitting back there in the hollow shadows of your wombs.?The crafty fibers of your souls?Are woven in and out?With the fibers of life.
POOR PEOPLE'S DREAMS
Sometimes women with eyes like wet green berries?Glide across the slick mirror of their own smiles?And vanish through lengths of gold and marble drawing rooms. The marble smiles,?As sensuous as snow;?Hips of the Graces;
Shoulders of Clytie;?Breasts frozen as foam,?Frozen as camelia bloom;?Mounds of marble flesh,?Inexplicable wonder of white....
I dream about statuesque beauties?Who look from the shadows of opera boxes;?Or elegant ladies in novels of eighteen thirty,?At the hunt ball...?Reflections in a polish floor,?A portrait by Renoir,?A Degas dancing girl,?English country houses,?An autumn afternoon in the Bois,?Something I have read of...?In sleep one vision retreating through another,?Like mirrors being doors to other mirrors,?Satin, and lace, and white shoulders,?And elegant ladies,?Dancing, dancing.
FOR WIVES AND MISTRESSES
Death,?Being a woman,?Being passive like all final things,?Being a mother,?Waits.
Shining faces?Gray and melt into her flesh.?Death envies those asleep in her,?Little children who have come back,?Fiery faces,?Bright for a moment in the darkness,?Extinguished softly in her womb.
PORTRAITS
PORTRAIT OF RICH OLD LADY
Old lady talks,?Spins from her lips?Warp and woof?Of teapots, tables, napery,?Sanitary toilets,?Old bedsteads, pictures on walls,?And fine lace,?Spins a cocoon of this secondary life.
Warm and snug is old lady's belly.?Old lady makes Venus Aphrodite?Parvenue.?Old lady?Arranges places for courtesans?In warm outbuildings on back streets.
NIGGER
Nigger with flat cheeks and swollen purple lips;?Nigger with loose red tongue;?Flat browed nigger,?Your skull peaked at the zenith,?The stretched glistening skin?Covered with tight coiled springs of hair:?I am up here cold.?I am white man.?You are still warm and sweet?With the darkness you were born in.
THE MAIDEN MOTHER
He has a squat body,?Glowering brows,?And bulging eyes.?Lustful contemplation of the meat pie?Is written all over his sweating face.
The thin woman with the meek voice,?Who has carried him so long in her body?And despairs of giving him birth,?Watches over him in secret?With bitter and resentful tenderness.
A PIOUS WOMAN
You can bury your face in her thick soul of cotton batting?And smell candle wax and church incense.?When she dies she must be burned.?Laid in the ground she would only soak up moisture?And get soggy,?As now she has a way of soaking up tears?Never meant for her.
A VERY OLD ROSE JAR
She ran across the lawn after the cat?And I saw through the old maid, as through a shadow,?A young girl in a white muslin dress running to meet her lover. There was clashing of cymbals,?And the flash of nereids' arms in autumn leaves.?A sharp high note died out like an ascending light.?Something sweet and wanton faded from the old maid's lips-- Something of Pierrot chasing after love,?A bacchante dying in her sleep,?A shadow,?And a gray cat.
THE NIXIE
He lies in cool shadows safe under rocks,?His eyes brown stones,?Worn smooth and soft,?But uncrumbled.?He reaches forth covert child-claws?To tickle the silver bellies of the little blind fish?As they swim secretly above him.?He laughs--?The school splinters, panic stricken.
As we stare through the lucid gold water?He gazes up at us from his shadowy retreat?In combative safety.?There are times when he pretends to himself that he is a god, Water god, land god, god-in-the-sky.?We cannot laugh at his grotesquerie.?We are wistful before the pathetic gallantries of his
imagination.
OLD LADIES' VALHALLA
I am thinking of a little house,?A pretty gray silk dress,?And a little maid with a tidy white apron.
I am thinking of thin yellow angels?Flying out of Sevres china tea cups,?And a cool spirit with slanting green eyes,?Who peers at me through the screen of plants?I have placed in the corner between the hearth and the window. I am thinking of the peace in one's own little home?When the afternoon sunshine drips on the shiny floor,?And the rugs are in order,?And the roses in the bowl plunge into shadow?Like pink nymphs into a pool,?While there is no sound to be heard above the hum
of the teakettle?Save the benevolent buzzing of flies in the clean sash curtain.
PORTRAITS OF POETS
I
(For L. R.)
To rush over dark waters,?A swift bird with cruel talons;?To seize life--?Your life for her--?To hold it,?Hold it struggling--?To kiss it.
II
Crystal self-containment,?Giving out only what is sent.?Startled,?The circumference retreats?As it mounts higher, flamelike,?Still and clear without radiance,?Ascending without self-explanation.
A skeleton falls apart?With the dignity of comprehensible pathos,?The bones bleached by denial.
III
With the impalpable lightness of May breezes?Begins a battle of flower petals:?Cowering in the primrose whirlwind his lips have blown,?The little grotesque with the shattered heart,?Fearful,?Yet sinister in his fearfulness.
THEODORE DREISER
The man body jumbled out of the earth, half formed,?Clay on the feet,?Heavy with the lingering might of chaos.?The man face so