What pain, to wake and miss you!
To wake with a tightened heart,
And mouth reaching forward to kiss you!
This then at last is the dawn, and the bell
Clanging at the farm! Such bewilderment
Comes with the sight of the room, I cannot tell.
It is raining. Down the half-obscure road
Four labourers pass with their scythes
Dejectedly;--a huntsman goes by with his load:
A gun, and a bunched-up deer, its four little feet
Clustered dead.--And this is the dawn
For which I wanted the night to retreat!
Now and again
All my body springs alive,
And the life that is polarised in my eyes,
That quivers between my eyes and mouth,
Flies like a wild thing across my body,
Leaving my eyes half-empty, and clamorous,
Filling my still breasts with a flush and a flame,
Gathering the soft ripples below my breasts
Into urgent, passionate waves,
And my soft, slumbering belly
Quivering awake with one impulse of desire,
Gathers itself fiercely together;
And my docile, fluent arms
Knotting themselves with wild strength
To clasp what they have never clasped.
Then I tremble, and go trembling
Your body was a sacred cell always,
A jewel that grew dull in garish light,
An opal which beneath my wondering gaze
Gleamed rarely, softly throbbing in the night.
I touched your flesh with reverential hands,
For you were sweet and timid like a flower
That blossoms out of barren tropic sands,
Shedding its perfume in one golden hour.
You yielded to my touch with gentle grace,
And though my passion was a mighty wave
That buried you beneath its strong embrace,
You were yet happy in the moment’s grave.
Still more than passion consummate to me,
More than the nuptials immemorial sung,
Was the warm thrill that melted me to see
Your clean brown body, beautiful and young;
About me young and careless feet
Linger along the garish street;
Above, a hundred shouting signs
Shed down their bright fantastic glow
Upon the merry crowd and lines
Of moving carriages below.
Oh wonderful is Broadway--only
My heart, my heart is lonely.
Desire naked, linked with Passion,
Goes strutting by in brazen fashion;
From playhouse, cabaret and inn
The rainbow lights of Broadway blaze
All gay without, all glad within;
As in a dream I stand and gaze
At Broadway, shining Broadway--only
My heart, my heart is lonely.
Policeman in front of a bank 3 A.M. . . . lonely.
Policeman State and Madison . . . high noon . . .
mobs . . . cars . . . parcels . . . lonely.
Woman in suburbs . . . keeping night watch on a
sleeping typhoid patient . . . only a clock to talk
to ... lonesome.
Woman selling gloves ... bargain day department
store . . . furious crazy-work of many hands
slipping in and out of gloves . . . lonesome.
There is a woman on Michigan Boulevard keeps a
parrot and goldfish and two white mice.
She used to keep a houseful of girls in kimonos and
three pushbuttons on the front door.
Now she is alone with a parrot and goldfish and two
white mice . . . but these are some of her thoughts :
The love of a soldier on furlough or a sailor on shore
leave burns with a bonfire red and saffron.
The love of an emigrant workman whose wife is a
thousand miles away burns with a blue smoke.
The love of a young man whose sweetheart married
an older man for money burns with a sputtering uncertain
flame.
And there is a love . . . one in a thousand . . .,
burns clean and is gone leaving a white ash. . . .
Listen a while, the moon is a lovely woman, a lonely
woman, lost in a silver dress, lost in a circus
rider's silver dress.
Listen a while, the lake by night is a lonely woman, a
lovely woman, circled with birches and pines mixing
their green and white among stars shattered
in spray clear nights.
I know the moon and the lake have twisted the roots
under my heart the same as a lonely woman, a
lovely woman, in a silver dress, in a circus rider's
silver dress.
The sea is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs
an early sunset and a last morning star over the
oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land . . . five
white dice rolled from a tube.
Not so long ago ... the sea was large . . .
And to-day the sea has lost nothing ... it keeps all.
I am a loon about the sea.
I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I
forget so many sea songs and sea cries.
I am a loon about the sea.
So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper
shack trembling in a sand storm.
The sea knows more about them than they know themselves.
They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go.
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window.
Dust of the feet
And dust of the wheels,
Wagons and people going,
All day feet and wheels.
Now. . .
. . Only stars and mist
A lonely policeman.
Two cabaret dancers.
Stars and mist again.
No more feet or wheels.
No more dust and wagons.
Voices of dollars
And drops of blood
Voices of broken hearts,
. . Voices singing, singing,
. . Silver voices, singing,
While the hum and the hurry
Of passing footfalls
Beat in my ear like the restless surf
Of a wind-blown sea,
A soul came to me
Out of the look on a face.
Eyes like a lake
Where a storm-wind roams
Caught me from under
The rim of a hat.
I thought of a midsea wreck and bruised fingers clinging to a broken state-room door.
Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps.
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes.