In the pull of the wind I stand, lonely,
On the deck of a ship, rising, falling,
Wild night around me, wild water under me,
Whipped by the storm, screaming and calling.
Earth is hostile and the sea hostile,
Why do I look for a place to rest?
I must fight always and die fighting
With fear an unhealing wound in my breast.
I heard the water-fall rejoice
Singing like a choir,
I saw the sun flash out of it
Azure and amber fire.
The earth was like an open flower
Enamelled and arrayed,
The path I took to find its heart
Fluttered with sun and shade.
And while earth lured me, gently, gently,
Happy and all alone,
Suddenly a heavy snake
Reared black upon a stone.
Without you, love, I must contend
With longing that has never end ;
With loneliness, against whose bars
The sun is shattered and the stars;
With silence deeper than the sea.
That drowns the very thoughts of me.
With you, my sweet, I must endure
The cross of all who hold unsure
The precious boon ; must ever hear
The insistent monotone of Fear;
Must ever toward the zenith ache.
Abasing self, for your dear sake.
In those serene and potent eyes
Is there no kindly compromise?
Will they not grant me this release:
To see their light and still have peace.
I want to take a ship and go
Abroad, but where I do not know:
It isn't Paris, London, Rome,
Nagasaki, Naples, Nome,
Honolulu, Teheran,
Servia or Afghanistan;
And yet I want to take a ship
And give the place I'm in the slip —
Lord, tell me where I want to go;
Give a man a decent show!
O the agony of having too much power!
In my passive palm are hundreds of lives.
Strange alchemy, they drain my blood.
My heart becomes iron; my brain copper; my eyes silver; my lips brass.
Merely by twitching a supple finger, I twirl lives from me,
Strong-winged or fluttering and broken.
They are my children: I am their mother and father.
I watch them live and die.
The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The lips of one are twisted
To a hieroglyphic of silence.
The face of another is like a shining frog.
Another face is met by a question
That digs into it like sudden claws.
Beside it is a face like a mirror
In which a stiffened child dangles....
Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent,
Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence.
So we have a face
Cupped by tender insolences,
Half repenting insolences
Teasing their own angers.
Then, a tense exuberance
Brushes them away
And burns a humbly erect
Queen upon her face.
This happens in the space
Between a frown and indecision.
Her face becomes forlornly wild,
And a beggarly impatience
Hovers into furtive shame.
All the supplely intricate flame
Vanishes, and leaves no mark.
Her eyes are violently dark
Seasons bring nothing to this gulch
Save a harshly intimate anecdote
Scrawled, here and there, on paint and stone.
The houses shoulder each other
In a forced and passionless communion.
Their harassed angles rise
Like a violent picture-puzzle
Hiding a story that only ruins could reveal;
Their straight lines, robbed of power,
Meet in dwarfed rebellion.
Sometimes they stand like vastly flattened faces
Suffering ants to crawl
In and out of their gaping mouths.
Sometimes, in menial attitudes
They stand like Gothic platitudes
Slipshodly carved in dark brown stone.
With sardonic futility
The multi-coloured crowd,
Hurried by fervent sensuality,
Flees from something carried on its back.
Endlessly subdued, a sound
Pours up from the crowd,
Like some one ever gasping for breath
To utter releasing words.
Through the artificial valley
Made by gaudy evasions,
The stifled crowd files up and down,
Stabbing thought with rapid noises.
Women strutting dulcetly,
Embroider their unappeased hungers,
And men stumble toward a flitting opiate.
Sometimes a moment breaks apart
Like a vivid hyperbole,
The sun plunged into April’s freshness,
And struck its sparkling madness
Against the barnlike dejection
Of this dark red insane asylum.
A softly clutching noise
Stumbled from the open windows.
Now and then obliquely reeling shrieks
Rose, as though from men
To whom death had assumed
An inexpressibly kindly face.
A man stood at one window,
His gaunt face trembling underneath
A feverish jauntiness.
A long white feather slanted back
Upon his almost shapeless hat,
Drab discoloration
Of faces, façades, pawn-shops,
Second-hand clothing,
Smoky and fly-blown glass of lunch-rooms,
Odors of rancid life...
Deadly uniformity
Of eyes and windows
Alike devoid of light...
Holes wherein life scratches--
Mangy life
Nosing to the gutter's end...
Show-rooms and mimic pillars
Flaunting out of their gaudy vestibules
Bosoms and posturing thighs...
Over all the Elevated
Droning like a bloated fly.
Pythoness body--arching
Over the night like an ecstasy--
I feel your coils tightening...
And the world's lessening breath.