Touch me, touch me,
Little cool grass fingers,
Elusive, delicate grass fingers.
With your shy brushings,
Touch my face--
My naked arms--
My thighs--
My feet.
Is there nothing that is kind?
You need not fear me.
Soon I shall be too far beneath you,
For you to reach me, even,
With your tiny, timorous toes.
See! I give myself to you, Beloved!
My words are little jars
For you to take and put upon a shelf.
Their shapes are quaint and beautiful,
And they have many pleasant colours and lustres
To recommend them.
Also the scent from them fills the room
With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses.
When I shall have given you the last one,
You will have the whole of me,
But I shall be dead.
An arid daylight shines along the beach
Dried to a grey monotony of tone,
And stranded jelly-fish melt soft upon
The sun-baked pebbles, far beyond their reach
Sparkles a wet, reviving sea. Here bleach
The skeletons of fishes, every bone
Polished and stark, like traceries of stone,
The joints and knuckles hardened each to each.
And they are dead while waiting for the sea,
The moon-pursuing sea, to come again.
Their hearts are blown away on the hot breeze.
Only the shells and stones can wait to be
Washed bright. For living things, who suffer pain,
May not endure till time can bring them ease.
A MAN made a symphony
Out of the chords of his soul.
The notes ran upon the air like flights of chickadees,
They gathered together and hung
As bees above a syringa bush.
They crowded and clicked upon one another
In a flurry of progression.
And crashed in the simultaneous magnificence
Of a grand finale.
All this he heard.
But the neighbors heard only the croak
Of a wheezy, second-hand flageolet.
Forced to seek another lodging
He took refuge under the arch of a bridge.
For the river below him might be convenient
Some day.
There was a man
Who made his living
By painting roses
Upon silk.
He sat in an upper chamber
And painted,
And the noises of the street
Meant nothing to him.
When he heard bugles, and fifes, and drums,
He thought of red, and yellow, and white roses
Bursting in the sunshine,
And smiled as he worked.
He thought only of roses,
And silk.
When he could get no more silk
He stopped painting
Deborah and Christopher brought me dandelions,
Kenton brought me buttercups with summer on
their breath,
But Michael brought an autumn leaf, like lacy
filigree,
A wan leaf, a ghost leaf, beautiful as death.
Death in all loveliness, fragile and exquisite,
Who but he would choose it from all the blossoming
land?
Who but he would find it where it hid among the
flowers?
Death in all loveliness, he laid it in my hand.
I HAVE a harp of many strings
But two are enough for me :
One is for love and one for death;
And what would the third one be?
Before I learn another note
I may forget and go,
So while my hand is light and sure
I play on the strings I know.
Sometimes when I am at tea with you
I catch my breath
At a thought that is old as the world is old
And more bitter than death.
It is that the spoon that you just laid down
And the cup that you hold
May be here shining and insolent
When you are still and cold.
Your careless note that I laid away
May leap to my eyes like flame
When the world has almost forgotten your voice
Or the sound of your name.
The golden Virgin da Vinci drew
May smile on over my head,
And daffodils nod in the silver vase
When you are dead.
There is a mirror in my room
Less like a mirror than a tomb,
There are so many ghosts that pass
Across the surface of the glass.
When in the morning I arise
With circles round my tired eyes,
Seeking the glass to brush my hair
My mother's mother meets me there.
If in the middle of the day
I happen to go by that way,
I see a smile I used to know —
My mother, twenty years ago.
But when I rise by candlelight
To feed my baby in the night,
Then whitely in the glass I see
My dead child's face look out at me.
When you go up to die
Some not far distant day,
I wonder will you try
To tear your mask away,
And look life in the eyes
For once without disguise?
Behind your mask may hide
What treacherous, covered fires !
What hidden, torturing pride!
What sorrows, what desires!
Whatever there may be
There will be none to see.
Yet I think when you meet
Death coming through the skies,
Calmly his face you'll greet.
Coldly, without surprise ;
When you had been dead a week
I entered a shining shop,
And there in a neat pink row
Lay little dolls made of soap.
And I thought, "I will take one home.
How she will laugh to see it !
How it will bob in her bath
And slip through her dripping fingers !"
Only a moment I smiled.
Only a moment I dreamed it.
Then my heart stood still with pain
And I went out into the darkness.
A wind rose in the night,
(She had always feared it so!)
Sorrow plucked at my heart
And I could not help but go.
Softly I went and stood
By her door at the end of the hall.
Dazed with grief I watched
The candles flaring and tall.
The wind was wailing aloud:
I thought how she would have cried
For my warm familiar arms
And the sense of me by her side.
The candles flickered and leapt,
The shadows jumped on the wall.
She lay before me small and still
And did not care at all.