I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
But my heart was full of my new love's glory,
My eyes were laughing and unafraid.
I met one who had loved me madly
And told his love for all to hear--
But we talked of a thousand things together,
The past was buried too deep to fear.
I met the other, whose love was given
With never a kiss and scarcely a word--
Oh, it was then the terror took me
Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.
Oh, love that lives its life with laughter
Or love that lives its life with tears
Can die--but love that is never spoken
Goes like a ghost through the winding years. . . .
People that I meet and pass
In the city's broken roar,
Faces that I lose so soon
And have never found before,
Do you know how much you tell
In the meeting of our eyes,
How ashamed I am, and sad
To have pierced your poor disguise?
Secrets rushing without sound
Crying from your hiding places--
Let me go, I cannot bear
The sorrow of the passing faces.
--People in the restless street,
Can it be, oh can it be
In the meeting of our eyes
That you know as much of me?
Hushed in the smoky haze of summer sunset,
When I came home again from far-off places,
How many times I saw my western city
Dream by her river.
Then for an hour the water wore a mantle
Of tawny gold and mauve and misted turquoise
Under the tall and darkened arches bearing
Gray, high-flung bridges.
Against the sunset, water-towers and steeples
Flickered with fire up the slope to westward,
And old warehouses poured their purple shadows
Across the levee.
High over them the black train swept with thunder,
Cleaving the city, leaving far beneath it
Wharf-boats moored beside the old side-wheelers
Resting in twilight.
Fast the new trails lead
From wilderness to city!
Years pass ... Canada!
On city pavements
Two muffled, sombre nuns pace,
Behind laughing girls.
I am of the wind...
A wisp of the battering wind...
I trail my fingers along the Alps
And an avalanche falls in my wake...
I feel in my quivering length
When it buries the hamlet beneath...
I hurriedly sweep aside
The cities that clutter our path...
As we whirl about the circle of the globe...
As we tear at the pillars of the world...
Open to the wind,
The Destroyer!
The wind that is battering at your gates.
Indigo bulb of darkness
Punctured by needle lights
Through a fissure of brick canyon shutting out stars,
And a sliver of moon
Spigoting two high windows over the West river....
Boy, I met to-night,
Your eyes are two red-glowing arcs shifting with my vision....
They reflect as in a fading proof
The deadened eyes of a woman,
And your shed virginity,
Light as the withered pod of a sweet pea,
Moist and fragrant
Blows against my soul.
What are you to me, boy,
That I, who have passed so many lights,
Should carry your eyes
The houses of the city no longer hum and play:
They lie like careless drowsy giants, dumb, estranged.
One presses to his breast his toy, a lighted pane:
One stirs uneasily: one is cold in death.
And the late moon, fearfully peering over an immense shoulder,
Sees, in the shadow below, the unpeopled hush of a street.
Flickering of incessant rain
On flashing pavements:
Sudden scurry of umbrellas:
Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm.
The winds came clanging and clattering
From long white highroads whipping in ribbons up summits:
They strew upon the city gusty wafts of appleblossom,
And the rustling of innumerable translucent leaves.
Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain
Dripping from the eaves.
As I wandered over the city through the night,
I saw many strange things:
But I have forgotten all
Except one painted face.
Gaudy, shameless night-orchid,
Heavy, flushed, sticky with narcotic perfume,
There was something in you which made me prefer you
Above all the feeble forget-me-nots of the world.
You were neither burnt out nor pallid,
There was plain, coarse, vulgar meaning in every line of you
And no make-believe:
You were at least alive,
When all the rest were but puppets of the night.
Torridly the moon rolls upward
Against the smooth immensity of midsummer sky,
Changeless, inexhaustible:
The city beneath is still:
Heaven and Earth are clasped together,
Momently life grows as careless
As the life of the intense stars.
Out of the houses climbing,
Fuming up windows, flickering from every roof-top,
Rigid on sonorous pinnacles,
Silently swirl aloft
Love's infinite flamelets.
As I went through the city by day
I saw shadows in sunlight:
But in the night I saw everywhere
Stars within the darkness.
(A coldly fluting breeze:
Dark Pan under the trees.
Low laughter: up the sky
A star like a street-lamp left on high.)
As I went through the city by day
I was hustled by jostling people.
But in the night, the wind of the darkness
Whispered, "Hush!" to my soul.