With two white roses on her breasts,
White candles at head and feet,
Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;
Lord Death has found her sweet.
Her mother pawned her wedding ring
To lay her out in white;
She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing
To see herself tonight.
When June comes dancing o’er the death of May,
With scarlet roses tinting her green breast,
And mating thrushes ushering in her day,
And Earth on tiptoe for her golden guest,
I always see the evening when we met--
The first of June baptized in tender rain--
And walked home through the wide streets, gleaming wet,
Arms locked, our warm flesh pulsing with love’s pain.
I always see the cheerful little room,
And in the corner, fresh and white, the bed,
Sweet scented with a delicate perfume,
Wherein for one night only we were wed;
Where in the starlit stillness we lay mute,
And heard the whispering showers all night long,
And your brown burning body was a lute
Whereon my passion played his fevered song.
This handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter
mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the
sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.
Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of
a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their
faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails
who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown.
These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts;
these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as
feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I
turn my head and say good-by to no one who
hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.
Now that a crimson rambler
begins to crawl over the house
of our two lives —
Now that a red curve
winds across the shingles —
Now that hands
washed in early sunrises
climb and spill scarlet
on a white lattice weave —
Now that a loop of blood
is written on our roof
and reaching around a chimney —
How are the two lives of this house
to keep strong hands and strong hearts?
Here in a cage the dollars come down.
To the click of a tube the dollars tumble.
And out of a mouth the dollars run,
I finger the dollars,
Paper and silver,
Thousands a day.
Some days it's fun to finger the dollars.
Some days . . .
the dollars keep on in a sob or a whisper :
A flame of rose in the hair,
A flame of silk at the throat.
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker.
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves.
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories.
And asks you
A MAN saw the whole world as a grinning skull and
cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all
faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to
dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a
useless silence. So he saw it all. Then he went to a
Mischa Elman concert. Two hours waves of sound beat
on his eardrums. Music washed something or other inside
him. Music broke down and rebuilt something or
other in his head and heart. He joined in five encores
for the young Russian Jew with the fiddle. When he
got outside his heels hit the sidewalk a new way. He
was the same man in the same world as before. Only
there was a singing fire and a climb of roses everlastingly
If I tire of you, beautiful woman,
I know that the fault is mine;
Yet not all mine the failure
And not all mine the loss!
In loveliness still you walk;
But I have walked with sorrow!
I have threaded narrows,
And I have passed through perils
That you know nothing of!
And I in my grief have gazed
In eyes that were not yours;
And my emptier hours have known
The sigh of kindlier bosoms,
The kiss of kindlier mouths!
Yet the end of all is written,
And nothing, O rose-leaf woman,
"The sting of it all," you said, as you stooped low over your roses,
"The worst of it is, when I think of Death,
That Spring by Spring the Earth shall still be beautiful,
And Summer by Summer be lovely again,
--And I shall be gone!"
"I would not care, perhaps," you said, watching your roses,
"If only 'twere dust and ruin and emptiness left behind!
But the thought that Earth and April
Year by casual year
Shall waken around the old ways, soft and beautiful,
Year by year when I am away,
--This, this breaks my heart!"
If I love you, woman of rose
And warmth and wondering eyes,
If it so fall out
That you are the woman I choose,
Oh, what is there left to say,
And what should it matter to me,
Or what can it mean to you?
For under the two white breasts
And the womb that makes you woman
The call of the ages whispers
And the countless ghosts awaken,
And stronger than sighs and weeping
The urge that makes us one,
And older than hate or loving or shame
This want that builds the world!
All that night I walked alone and wept.
I tore a rose and dropped it on the ground.
My heart was lead; all that night I kept
Listening to hear a dreadful sound.
A tree bent down and dew dripped from its hair.
The earth was warm; dawn came solemnly.
I stretched full-length upon the grass and there
I said your name but silence answered me.
You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colours.
My vigour is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,