Dreams are eyes fixed on closed doors
And on threshold-lights lighting cold floors.
Dreams are doors swung strangely back
On the wonder of a ribbony track.
Dreams are voices, echoed and thinned,
Calling . . . drowned out in the wind.
Dreams are feet on the edge of lands
Feeling the suck of hidden sands.
He knocked, and I beheld him at the door--
A vision for the gods to verify.
“What battered ancientry is this,” thought I,
“And when, if ever, did we meet before?”
But ask him as I might, I got no more
For answer than a moaning and a cry:
Too late to parley, but in time to die,
He staggered, and lay shapeless on the floor.
When had I known him? And what brought him here?
Love, warning, malediction, hunger, fear?
Surely I never thwarted such as he?--
Again, what soiled obscurity was this:
Out of what scum, and up from what abyss,
Had they arrived--these rags of memory?
This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed. . . . Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see. . . . Look yet again--
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.
Did you ever see an alligator
Come up to the air from the mud,
Staring blindly under the full glare of noon?
Have you seen the stabled horses at night
Tremble and start back at the sight of a lantern?
Have you ever walked in darkness
When an unknown door was open before you
And you stood, it seemed, in the light of a thousand candles
Of delicate wax?
Have you walked with the wind in your ears
And the sunlight about you
And found it suddenly shine with an inner splendor?
Out of the mud many times
Before many doors of light
Through many fields of splendor,
Where around your steps a soundless glory scatters
Waving slowly before me, pushed into the dark,
Unseen my hands explore the silence, drawing the
bark
Of my body slowly behind.
Nothing to meet my fingers but the fleece of night
Invisible blinding my face and my eyes! What if
in their flight
My hands should touch the door!
What if I suddenly stumble, and push the door
Open, and a great grey dawn swirls over my feet,
before
I can draw back!
What if unwitting I set the door of eternity wide
And am swept away in the horrible dawn, am gone
down the tide
Of eternal hereafter!
I LOOK at the swaling sunset
And wish I could go alsoThrough the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.
I wish that I could goThrough the red doors where I could put off
My shame like shoes in the porch,
My pain like garments,
And leave my flesh discarded lying
Like luggage of some departed traveller
Gone one knows not where.
Then I would turn round,And seeing my cast-off body lying like lumber,
I would laugh with joy.
Hollow rang the house when I knocked on the door,
And I lingered on the threshold with my hand
Upraised to knock and knock once more:
Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor,
Hollow re-echoed my heart.
The low-hung lamps stretched down the road
With shadows drifting underneath,
With a music of soft, melodious feet
Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet
The low-hung light of her eyes.
The golden lamps down the street went out,
The last car trailed the night behind;
And I in the darkness wandered about
With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt
In the dying lamp of my love.
Two brown ponies trotting slowly
Child of the Aztec gods, how long must we listen here, how long before we go?
The dust is deep on the lintels.
The dust is dark on the doors.
If the dreams shake our bones, what can we say or do?
Since early morning we waited.
Since early, early morning, child.
There must be dreams on the way now.
There must be a song for our bones.
The dust gets deeper and darker.
Do the doors and lintels shudder?
How long must we listen here?
How long before we go?
I LOVE him, I love him, ran the patter of her lips
And she formed his name on her tongue and sang
And she sent him word she loved him so much,
So much, and death was nothing ; work, art, home,
All was nothing if her love for him was not first
Of all ; the patter of her lips ran, I love him,
I love him ; and he knew the doors that opened
Into doors and more doors, no end of doors,
And full length mirrors doubling and tripling
The apparitions of doors : circling corridors of
Looking glasses and doors, some with knobs, some
With no knobs, some opening slow to a heavy push,
And some jumping open at a touch and a hello.
And he knew if he so wished he could follow her
Glad with the wine of life,
Reeling I go my way,
Drunk with the ache of living
And mouthing my drunken song!
Then comes the lucid moment
And the shadow across the lintel;
And I hear the ghostly whisper,
And I glimpse with startled eyes
The Door beyond the doorway,
And I see the small dark house
Where I must sleep.
Then song turns sour on my lips,
And the warmth goes out of my blood,
And I turn me back to the beaker,
And re-draining my cup of dream,
I drown the whispering voices,
Quietly I closed the door.
Then I said to my soul:
"I shall never come back,
Back to this haunted room
Where Sorrow and I have slept."
I turned from that hated door
And passed through the House of Life,
Through its ghostly rooms and glad
And its corridors dim with age.
Then lightly I crossed a threshold
Where the casements showed the sun
And I entered an unknown room,--
And my heart went cold,
For about me stood that Chamber of Pain
I had thought to see no more!
Listen!
Footsteps
Are they,
That falter through the gloom,
That echo through the lonely chambers
Of our house of life?
Listen!
Did a door close?
Did a whisper waken?
Did a ghostly something
Sigh across the dusk?
From the mournful silence
Something, something went!
Far down some shadowy passage
Faintly closed a door--
And O how empty lies