Smiles are the words beyond the words
That thoughts abandon helplessly.
Upon this nervous shop-girl’s face,
Where clusters of tiny limpness meet,
A frightened spark leaps high and drops
Into the hot pause of a banished love.
A lustrelessly plump
Girl beside her does not know
That her face for moments glows
Into a helpless solitude.
Upon an old man’s face
Are gleams of meek embarrassment--
The faded presence of some old debt?
This woman’s face is scorched
By a torch that falls from weary hands
And makes her laugh an unheard lie.
You took the rare blue from my cloudy sky;
You shot the one bird in my silent wood;
You crushed my rose — one rose alone had I.
You have not known. You have not understood.
I would have shown you pictures I have seen
Of unimagined mountains, plains and seas;
I would have made you songs of leafy green,
If you had left me some small ecstasies.
Now let the one dear field be only field,
That was a garden for the mighty gods.
Take you its corn. I keep its better yield —
The glory that I found within its clods.
Old Jock and Marie Anne could never find
Raspberries of the glowing amber kind
To fill the “ancient porcelain bowl.” (’Twas lined
With amber glaze; outside a gold vine wound
In such a graceful pattern round and round.)
But if my Mother looked she always found
Enough to fill the bowl. That day we’d three
Distinguished guests. I loved to have them see
My lovely Mother as she looked at tea....
Her gown of creamy lace--her shining hair,
Her beads of old carved amber ... all her rare
Fragile soft richness, like the berries there
With their pale amber bloom. I loved her so....
I wished that every body there could know....
“Why don’t you eat your berries, Child?” ... then low
“O Mistress Mary--Mistress Mary--
What have you found in your new old house?
Paperers are waiting you, and carpenters, and gardeners--
And you are up garret, just as still as a mouse!
What makes your eyes so wet and so round?
Mary--Mary! What have you found?”
“Where the sour old wind grieves under the eaves
There’s an old trunk hid--Oh the dust on the lid!
I pulled out from it a gay round box,
And in it were worn-out boots and socks--
Little, soft socks and little, stout boots--
And a child’s crude drawings of flowers and fruits,
And a tiny toy whip, and a ship and a ball--
Oh--they’re just like a little lost boy! That’s all!”
You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by the water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say.
My mother remembers the agony of her womb
And long years that seemed to promise more than this.
She says, "You do not love me,
You do not want me,
You will go away."
In the country whereto I go
I shall not see the face of my friend
Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;
Together we shall not find
The land on whose hills bends the new moon
In air traversed of birds.
She was a wild plum flower,
As fair as that fair thing;
A breathless blowing hers,
As it were the last spring.
Not anything to her
A spire with stars for fold;
A rose though but the one;
Or a sack full of gold.
We could not make her care
For sheep bells coming home;
For yarrow in a field;
For gilded frock or comb.
Once, like a wild plum flower.
She strewed her leaves to night,
All her white loneliness
In a moment gone from sight.
Oh, for a world empty of you,
Quite bare of anything.
With any likeness to the old.
For wild remembering!
A world so wholly different,
I would be different too.
And read, or mend, or plant the bulbs,
Without a thought of you.
But this can never be at all;
Some small thing thereabout
Would bring that same hurt back again,
And tear my wild heart out.
Perhaps the smell of yarrow flowers,
Of yarrow flowers set
In a lost field. White: yarrow flowers.
Out in the August wet.
As one, who comes back to a house of yore,
Some high old house in legendary trees.
And misses blue flower here; there, at the door.
Notes thinning bush, a difference in the bees;
Then enters, halts, and of a sudden knows
A face gone out, a step lost on the stair.
So I, in England. Every buffet shows
Upon her cheek; her every bone lies bare.
Yet comes not still the bloom to urban bough?
Yet pluck not girls the country thorn and sigh?
Folks buy, and sow, and neighbors go about?
Oh, different! Oh, more worth loving now.
Spent loveliness, that hurts me like a cry; —
The step lost on the stair, the face gone out!
As I came down the Old York Road
Saint John's began to ring,
Across the Dead Folk in the grass,
The wide new dusk of spring.
Each window was a half-blown flower,
The pool beneath the hedge
Looked like a scrap of Tyrian gold
Dropped thinly in the sedge.
I think that never in the world
Blew there a tree so white
As the wild cherry by the wall,
So lonely to the sight.
As I came down the Old York Road
Not any soul was near,
Except two lovers going by
Within the fleet of year.
Suddenly flickered a flame,
Suddenly fluttered a wing:
What, can a dead bird sing?
Somebody spoke your name.
Suddenly fluttered a wing,
Sounded a voice, the same,
Somebody spoke your name:
Oh, the remembering!
Sounded a voice, the same,
Song of the heart's wild Spring,
Oh, the remembering:
Which of us was to blame?
Song of the heart's wild Spring,
Wings that still flutter, lame,
Which of us was to blame? —
God, the slow withering!
Playing in the fire and twilight together,
My little son and I,
Suddenly--woefully--I stoop to catch him.
“Try, mother, try!”
Old Nurse Silence lifts a silent finger:
“Hush! cease your play!”
What happened? What in that tiny moment
Flew away?
By the old toy cabinet,
I stand and turn over dusty things:
Chessmen--card games--hoops and balls--
Toy rifles, helmets, swords,
In the far corner
A doll's tea-set in a box.
Where are you, golden child,
Who gave tea to your dolls and me?
The golden child is growing old,
Further than Rome or Babylon
From you have passed those foolish years.
She lives--she suffers--she forgets.
By the old toy cabinet,
I idly stand and awkwardly
Finger the lock of the tea-set box.
What matter--why should I look inside,