You are a well sprayed with cool rubies of sound
In which I bathe and rise with another skin
Like moon-stone passion slyly courting
The light breath of a tired dream.
I drop my heart into the depths
Of your disheveled serenity,
And stroll off empty.
When my heart has merged to your shades of pearl quietness
I return and once more drop within you.
Rounded to a wide eyed clownishness
Crowned by the shifting bravado
Of his long, brown ears,
The rabbit peeked at the sky.
To him, the sky seemed an angelic
Pasture stripped to phantom tranquility,
Where one could nibble thoughtfully.
He longed to leave his mild furtiveness
And speak to a boldness puzzled by his flesh.
With one long circle of despairing grace
He flashed into the air,
Leaping toward his heaven.
But down he crashed against a snake
Who ate him with a meditative interest.
From that day on the snake was filled
With little, meek whispers of concern.
Be a liquid threshold for the dawn
And let night touch you with his back.
The earth-bowl prisoning you, and cold night winds
Are only pause and rhythm
Within an endless fantasy,
But you, like they, can be
A dream from the loins of a dream,
And build a golden stairway of escape.
O coolly unperturbed pool,
Slap your ripples in laughter at men,
Who splash you with their lordly hands.
Time is but a phantom dagger
That motion lifts to slay itself.
After the wind in the wood,
Peace, and the night.
After the bond and the brood,
Flight.
After the height and the hush
Where the wild hawk swings,
Heart of the earth-loving thrush
Shaken with wings.
After the bloom and the leaf
Rain on the nest.
After the splendour and grief,
Rest.
After the hills and the far
Glories and gleams,
Cloud, and the dawn of a star,
And dreams.
We've kept the faith. Our souls' high dreams
Untouched by bondage and its rod,
Burn on! and on! and on! It seems
We shall have FRIENDS--while God is God!
Hyacinth dreams in the arbour ...
Just a crumpled mass of gray ...
Soft ashen hair and colourless skin,
Small, delicate hands blue-veined and thin ...
Hyacinth dreams in the arbour
And who shall say
What Hyacinth dreams to-day?
Hyacinth dreams in the arbour
And the stealthy pussy-cat creeps
To her silken lap in the soft green gloom.
Room for the pussy-cat, Hyacinth ... room!
Hyacinth dreams, in the arbour,
Of Life ... that steals and leaps
Like a panther out of the shadows ...
Hyacinth sleeps.
Hyacinth! Hyacinth! Open your eyes!
Men die...
Dreams only change their houses.
They cannot be lined up against a wall
And quietly buried under ground,
And no more heard of...
However deep the pit and heaped the clay--
Like seedlings of old time
Hooding a sacred rose under the ice cap of the world--
Dreams will to light.
I love you, malcontent
Male wind--
Shaking the pollen from a flower
Or hurling the sea backward from the grinning sand.
Blow on and over my dreams...
Scatter my sick dreams...
Throw your lusty arms about me...
Envelop all my hot body...
Carry me to pine forests--
Great, rough-bearded forests...
Bring me to stark plains and steppes...
I would have the North to-night--
The cold, enduring North.
And if we should meet the Snow,
Whirling in spirals,
And he should blind my eyes...
I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day....
(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium...
domes
fired in sulphurous mist...
sea
quiescent as a gray seal...
and the emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay....)
But the day is an up-turned cup
and its sun a junk of red iron
guttering in sluggish-green water--
Secrets
infesting my half-sleep...
did you enter my wound from another wound
brushing mine in a crowd...
or did I snare you on my sharper edges
as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up
carries off spiders on its wings?
Secrets,
running over my soul without sound,
only when dawn comes tip-toeing
ushered by a suave wind,
and dreams disintegrate
like breath shapes in frosty air,
I shall overhear you, bare-foot,
scatting off into the darkness....
I shall know you, secrets
KINGS' wares; and dreams; and April dusks
Out in the golden dew,
One sighing in a secret lane;—
These wrought the look of you.
God made you out of lonely things;
To set you at our door,
He tumbled down into the dark
A hundred towns or more.
Day is the heart's red field,
And many an anguish there
Is lost or won,
And many a hope lies hopeless in the sun;
But night, the conqueror kind.
Spreads its blessed treaty of the stars,
Where the heart's peace is signed.
Under the moon's white flag
I meet my ambushed dreams,
I see the foe,
Whom I have faced and put to flight, I know,
Yielding his hosts to me;
And in strong, vanquished hands I lay
My weeping victory.