Collected Poems
Page 14
Lives the mild winter through;
The lavender died each winter in the garden
Of the house I built for you.
You were troubled and came to me because the farmer
Called the autumn “the fall”;
You thought that a country where the lavender died in the winter
Was not a country at all.
The wrens return each year to the house in the orchard;
They have lived, they have seen the world, they know what’s best
For a wren and his wife; in the handsome house I gave them
They build their twiggy nest.
But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home
To a leaky castle across the sea,—
To lie awake in linen smelling of lavender,
And hear the nightingale, and long for me.
Pretty Love, I Must Outlive You
Pretty Love, I must outlive you;
And my little dog Llewelyn,
Dreaming here with treble whimpers,
Jerking paws and twitching nostrils
On the hearth-rug, will outlive you,
If no trap or shot-gun gets him.
Parrots, tortoises and redwoods
Live a longer life than men do,
Men a longer life than dogs do,
Dogs a longer life than love does.
What a fool I was to take you,
Pretty Love, into my household,
Shape my days and nights to charm you,
Center all my hopes about you,
Knowing well I must outlive you,
If no trap or shot-gun gets me.
English Sparrows
(Washington Square)
How sweet the sound in the city an hour before sunrise,
When the park is empty and grey and the light clear and so lovely
I must sit on the floor before my open window for an hour with my arms on the sill
And my cheek on my arm, watching the spring sky’s
Soft suffusion from the roofed horizon upward with palest rose,
Doting on the charming sight with eyes
Open, eyes closed;
Breathing with quiet pleasure the cool air cleansed by the night, lacking all will
To let such happiness go, nor thinking the least thing ill
In me for such indulgence, pleased with the day and with myself. How sweet
The noisy chirping of the urchin sparrows from crevice and shelf
Under my window, and from down there in the street,
Announcing the advance of the roaring competitive day with city bird-song.
A bumbling bus
Goes under the arch. A man bareheaded and alone
Walks to a bench and sits down.
He breathes the morning with me; his thoughts are his own.
Together we watch the first magnanimous
Rays of the sun on the tops of greening trees and on houses of red brick and of stone.
Impression: Fog Off the Coast of Dorset
As day was born, as night was dying,
The seagulls woke me with their crying;
And from the reef the mooing horn
Spoke to the waker: Day is born
And night is dying, but still the fog
On dimly looming deck and spar
Is dewy, and on the vessel’s log,
And cold the first-mate’s fingers are,
And wet the pen wherewith they write
“Off Portland. Fog. No land in sight.”
—As night was dying, and glad to die,
And day, with dull and gloomy eye,
Lifting the sun, a smoky lamp,
Peered into fog, that swaddled sky
And wave alike: a shifty damp
Unwieldy province, loosely ruled,
Turned over to a prince unschooled,
That he must govern with sure hand
Straightway, not knowing sea from land.
The Rabbit
Hearing the hawk squeal in the high sky
I and the rabbit trembled.
Only the dark small rabbits newly kittled in their neatly dissembled
Hollowed nest in the thicket thatched with straw
Did not respect his cry.
At least, not that I saw.
But I have said to the rabbit with rage and a hundred times, “Hop!
Streak it for the bushes! Why do you sit so still?
You are bigger than a house, I tell you, you are bigger than a hill, you are a beacon for air-planes!
O indiscreet!
And the hawk and all my friends are out to kill!
Get under cover!” But the rabbit never stirred; she never will.
And I shall see again and again the large eye blaze
With death, and gently glaze;
The leap into the air I shall see again and again, and the kicking feet;
And the sudden quiet everlasting, and the blade of grass green in the strange mouth of the interrupted grazer.
Song for Young Lovers in a City
Though less for love than for the deep
Though transient death that follows it
These childish mouths grown soft in sleep
Here in a rented bed have met,
They have not met in love’s despite . . .
Such tiny loves will leap and flare
Lurid as coke-fires in the night,
Against a background of despair.
To treeless grove, to grey retreat
Descend in flocks from corniced eaves
The pigeons now on sooty feet,
To cover them with linden leaves.
To a Calvinist in Bali
You that are sprung of northern stock,
And nothing lavish,—born and bred
With tablets at your foot and head,
And CULPA carven in the rock,
Sense with delight but not with ease
The fragrance of the quinine trees,
The kembang-spatu’s lolling flame
With solemn envy kin to shame.
Ah, be content!—the scorpion’s tail
Atones for much; without avail
Under the sizzling solar pan
Our sleeping servant pulls the fan.
Even in this island richly blest,
Where Beauty walks with naked breast,
Earth is too harsh for Heaven to be
One little hour in jeopardy.
Thanksgiving Dinner
Ah, broken garden, frost on the melons and on the beans!
Frozen are the ripe tomatoes, the red fruit and the hairy golden stem;
Frozen are the grapes, and the vine above them frozen, and the peppers are frozen!
And I walk among them smiling,—for what of them?
I can live on the woody fibres of the overgrown
Kohl-rabi, on the spongy radish coarse and hot,
I can live on what the squirrels may have left of the beechnuts and the acorns . . .
For pride in my love, who might well have died, and did not.
I will cook for my love a banquet of beets and cabbages,
Leeks, potatoes, turnips, all such fruits . . .
For my clever love, who has returned from further than the far east;
We will laugh like spring above the steaming, stolid winter roots.
The Snow Storm
No Hawk hangs over in this air:
The urgent snow is everywhere.
The wing adroiter than a sail
Must lean away from such a gale,
Abandoning its straight intent,
Or else expose tough ligament
And tender flesh to what before
Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.
Forceless upon our backs there fall
Infrequent flakes hexagonal,
Devised in many a curious style
To charm our safety for a while,
Where close to earth like mice we go
Under the Hor
izontal snow.
Huntsman, What Quarry?
“Huntsman, what quarry
On the dry hill
Do your hounds harry?
When the red oak is bare
And the white oak still
Rattles its leaves
In the cold air:
What fox runs there?”
“Girl, gathering acorns
In the cold autumn,
I hunt the hot pads
That ever run before,
I hunt the pointed mask
That makes no reply,
I hunt the red brush
Of remembered joy.”
“To tame or to destroy?”
“To destroy.”
“Huntsman, hard by
In a wood of grey beeches
Whose leaves are on the ground,
Is a house with a fire;
You can see the smoke from here.
There’s supper and a soft bed
And not a soul around.
Come with me there;
Bide there with me;
And let the fox run free.”
The horse that he rode on
Reached down its neck,
Blew upon the acorns,
Nuzzled them aside;
The sun was near setting;
He thought, “Shall I heed her?”
He thought, “Shall I take her
For a one-night’s bride?”
He smelled the sweet smoke,
He looked the lady over;
Her hand was on his knee;
But like a flame from cover
The red fox broke—
And “Hoick! Hoick!” cried he.
Not So Far as the Forest
I
That chill is in the air
Which the wise know well, and even have learned to bear.
This joy, I know,
Will soon be under snow.
The sun sets in a cloud
And is not seen.
Beauty, that spoke aloud,
Addresses now only the remembering ear.
The heart begins here
To feed on what has been.
Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.
Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.
II
Branch by branch
This tree has died. Green only
Is one last bough, moving its leaves in the sun.
What evil ate its root, what blight,
What ugly thing,
Let the mole say, the bird sing;
Or the white worm behind the shedding bark
Tick in the dark.
You and I have only one thing to do:
Saw the trunk through.
III
Distressed mind, forbear
To tease the hooded Why;
That shape will not reply.
From the warm chair
To the wind’s welter
Flee, if storm’s your shelter.
But no, you needs must part,
Fling him his release—
On whose ungenerous heart
Alone you are at peace.
IV
Not dead of wounds, not borne
Home to the village on a litter of branches, torn
By splendid claws and the talk all night of the villagers,
But stung to death by gnats
Lies Love.
What swamp I sweated through for all these years
Is at length plain to me.
V
Poor passionate thing,
Even with this clipped wing how well you flew!—though not so far as the forest.
Unwounded and unspent, serene but for the eye’s bright trouble,
Was it the lurching flight, the unequal wind under the lopped feathers that brought you down,
To sit in folded colours on the level empty field,
Visible as a ship, paling the yellow stubble?
Rebellious bird, warm body foreign and bright,
Has no one told you?—Hopeless is your flight
Towards the high branches. Here is your home,
Between the barnyard strewn with grain and the forest tree.
Though Time refeather the wing,
Ankle slip the ring,
The once-confined thing
Is never again free.
Rendezvous
Not for these lovely blooms that prank your chambers did I come. Indeed,
I could have loved you better in the dark;
That is to say, in rooms less bright with roses, rooms more casual, less aware
Of History in the wings about to enter with benevolent air
On ponderous tiptoe, at the cue “Proceed.”
Not that I like the ash-trays over-crowded and the place in a mess,
Or the monastic cubicle too unctuously austere and stark,
But partly that these formal garlands for our Eighth Street Aphrodite are a bit too Greek,
And partly that to make the poor walls rich with our unaided loveliness
Would have been more chic.
Yet here I am, having told you of my quarrel with the taxi-driver over a line of Milton, and you laugh; and you are you, none other.
Your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows.
But I am perverse: I wish you had not scrubbed—with pumice, I suppose—
The tobacco stains from your beautiful fingers. And I wish I did not feel like your mother.
The Fitting
The fitter said, “Madame, vous avez maigri,”
And pinched together a handful of skirt at my hip.
“Tant mieux,” I said, and looked away slowly, and took my under-lip
Softly between my teeth.
Rip—rip!
Out came the seam, and was pinned together in another place.
She knelt before me, a hardworking woman with a familiar and unknown face,
Dressed in linty black, very tight in the arm’s-eye and smelling of sweat.
She rose, lifting my arm, and set her cold shears against me,—snip-snip;
Her knuckles gouged my breast. My drooped eyes lifted to my guarded eyes in the glass, and glanced away as from someone they had never met.
“Ah, que madame a maigri!” cried the vendeuse, coming in with dresses over her arm.
“C’est la chaleur,” I said, looking out into the sunny tops of the horse-chestnuts—and indeed it was very warm.
I stood for a long time so, looking out into the afternoon, thinking of the evening and you. . . .
While they murmured busily in the distance, turning me, touching my secret body, doing what they were paid to do.
What Savage Blossom
Do I not know what savage blossom only under the pitting hail
Of your inclement climate could have prospered? Here lie
Green leaves to wade in, and of the many roads not one road leading outward from this place
But is blocked by boughs that will hiss and simmer when they burn—green autumn, lady, green autumn on this land!
Do I not know what inward pressure only could inflate its petals to withstand
(No, no, not hate, not hate) the onslaught of a little time with you?
No, no, not love, not love. Call it by name,
Now that it’s over, now that it is gone and cannot hear us.
It was an honest thing. Not noble. Yet no shame.
Menses
(He speaks, but to himself, being aware how it is with her)
Think not I have not heard.
Well-fanged the double word
And well-directed flew.
I felt it. Down my side
Innocent as oil I see the ugly venom slide:
Poison enough to stiffen us both, and all our friends;
But I am not pierced, so there the mischief ends.
There is more to be said; I see it coi
ling;
The impact will be pain.
Yet coil; yet strike again.
You cannot riddle the stout mail I wove
Long since, of wit and love.
As for my answer . . . stupid in the sun
He lies, his fangs drawn:
I will not war with you.
You know how wild you are. You are willing to be turned
To other matters; you would be grateful, even.
You watch me shyly. I (for I have learned
More things than one in our few years together)
Chafe at the churlish wind, the unseasonable weather.
“Unseasonable?” you cry, with harsher scorn
Than the theme warrants; “Every year it is the same!
‘Unseasonable!’ they whine, these stupid peasants!—and never since they were born
Have they known a spring less wintry! Lord, the shame,
The crying shame of seeing a man no wiser than the beasts he feeds—
His skull as empty as a shell!”
(“Go to. You are unwell.”)
Such is my thought, but such are not my words.
“What is the name,” I ask, “of those big birds
With yellow breast and low and heavy flight,
That make such mournful whistling?”
“Meadowlarks,”
You answer primly, not a little cheered.
“Some people shoot them.” Suddenly your eyes are wet
And your chin trembles. On my breast you lean,
And sob most pitifully for all the lovely things that are not and have been.
“How silly I am!—an d I know how silly I am!”
You say; “You are very patient. You are very kind.
I shall be better soon. Just Heaven consign and damn
To tedious Hell this body with its muddy feet in my mind!”
The Plaid Dress
Strong sun, that bleach
The curtains of my room, can you not render
Colourless this dress I wear?—
This violent plaid
Of purple angers and red shames; the yellow stripe
Of thin but valid treacheries; the flashy green of kind deeds done
Through indolence, high judgments given in haste;
The recurring chccker of the serious breach of taste?
No more uncoloured than unmade,