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Amy Lowell
I CANNOT see your face.
When I think of you.
It is your hands which I see.
Your hands
Sewing,
Holding a book.
Resting for a moment on the sill of a window.
My eyes keep always the sight of your hands.
But my heart holds the sound of your voice.
And the soft brightness which is your soul.
The noise of the city sounds below me.
It clashes against the houses
And rises like smoke through the narrow streets.
It polishes the marble fronts of houses.
Grating itself against them.
And they shine in the lamplight
And cast their echoes back upon the asphalt of the streets.
But I hear no sound of your voice.
The city is incoherent — trivial.
And my brain aches with emptiness.
I am the captain
leave the going to me
I believe I shall
some ordinary afternoon
all alone I am them
to see and sit
with a town
doing much in me
my office is in the ear
with any midnight voice
oiled and drunk
trouble sings
in a melancholy method
and the one bed is for her
the bark of merchants
who took no dole
not knowing any want
we the people
all throat
could not speak
night is coming
and the whole city is in on it
though nobody told me
I know what I see
I sit quietly with the strangeness
my mind full of voices
like a dialect I understand nothing of
I hear nothing
but a great tree
the voices that have
been with me all my life
crowd into the crown
an oratory of disorder
compelling hope for the future
like an idle boy
looking in our faces
to see who we might be
a grammar of rain
is like the open road
a full thing whose voice
I am nothing to
I am the parrot
brought from the sea:
I speak like a ruffian
to the light.
The child killed his melancholy out of doors.
I heard voices that told me likewise to turn,
told me to talk with a knave,
told me to give.
So uh...
You know how I said you were pretty?
That was mostly to see how you'd react.
And your reaction-
Confused amusement-
It made me happy.
Actually, that might just be you?
You kinda make me happy.
More happy than anyone else I've talked to.
I think it's because you never look a me like everyone else does-
Like I'm just a bug that they wish would go away.
And-as much as I dislike it
(I'm used to it when I'm in trouble. Never anytime else)-
You actually look me in the eye.
My family doesn't even do that.
Or maybe it's how you don't make fun of me