Nay, why reproach each other, be unkind,
For there’s no plane on which we two may meet?
Let’s both forgive, forget, for both were blind,
And life is of a day, and time is fleet.
And I am fire, swift to flame and burn,
Melting with elements high overhead,
While you are water in an earthly urn,
All pure, but heavy, and of hue like lead.
The grip of the ice is gone now.
The silvers chase purple.
The purples tag silver.
They let out their runners
Here where summer says to the lilies :
" Wish and be wistful,
Circle this wind-hunted, wind-sung water."
Come along always, come along now.
You for me, kiss me, pull me by the ear.
Push me along with the wind push.
Sing like the whinnying wind.
Sing like the hustling obstreperous wind.
Have you ever seen deeper purple . . .
this in my wild wind fingers?
Could you have more fun with a pony or a goat ?
Have you seen such flicking heels before,
If we were such and so, the same as these, maybe we too would be slingers and sliders, tumbling half over in the water mirrors, tumbling half over at the horse heads of the sun, tumbling our purple numbers.
Twirl on, you and your satin blue.
Be water birds, be air birds.
Be these purple tumblers you are.
Dip and get away
From loops into slip-knots,
Write your own ciphers and figure eights.
It is your wooded island here in Lincoln park.
Everybody knows this belongs to you.
Five fat geese
Eat grass on a sod bank
And never count your slinging ciphers, your sliding figure eights,
A man on a green paint iron bench,
Slouches his feet and sniffs in a book,
And looks at you and your loops and slip-knots,
Seven days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding
through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat's neck in the teeth of a scuffling
mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled
in granite languages on a gray sky,
A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against
a night sky,
And a circle of lights blinking: Ninety thousand
people here.
Among the Wednesday night thousands in
goloshes and coats slickered for rain,
I learned how hungry I was for streets and
people.
I would rather be water than anything else.
Thirty-two Greeks are dipping their feet in a creek.
Sloshing their bare feet in a cool flow of clear water.
All one midsummer day ten hours the Greeks
stand in leather shoes shoveling gravel.
Now they hold their toes and ankles
to the drift of running water.
Then they go to the bunk cars
and eat mulligan and prune sauce.
Smoke one or two pipefuls, look at the stars,
tell smutty stories
About men and women they have known,
countries they have seen,
Railroads they have built —
and then the deep sleep of children.
Chatter of birds two by two raises a night song joining
a litany of running water — sheer waters showing the
russet of old stones remembering many rains.
And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the
running water, and sleep from much music; joined
songs of day-end, feathery throats and stony waters,
in a choir chanting new psalms.
It is too much for the long willows when low laughter
of a red moon comes down ; and the willows drowse
and sleep on the shoulders of the running water.
I WROTE a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.
I answered:
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
it will all go back to mist,
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and
tissue
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last
answers
Go running back to dust and mist.
O SPRING of my Content,
The parching days are spent.
Where'er your feeding waters move
There is the sweet increase of love.
I, wanderer in a wilderness
Starved of all hope and comfortless,
Now lay me down in groves of cool delight
Which you have nurtured, in a charmed night.
I should like to creep
Through the long brown grasses
That are your lashes;
I should like to poise
On the very brink
Of the leaf-brown pools
That are your shadowed eyes;
I should like to cleave
Without sound,
Their glimmering waters,
Their unrippled waters,
I should like to sink down
And down
And down ...
And deeply drown.
Would I be more than a bubble breaking?
Gushing from the mouths of stone men
To spread at ease under the sky
In granite-lipped basins,
Where iris dabble their feet
And rustle to a passing wind,
The water fills the garden with its rushing,
In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.
Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,
Where trickle and plash the fountains,
Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.
Splashing down moss-tarnished steps
It falls, the water;
And the air is throbbing with it.
With its gurgling and running.
With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.
And I wished for night and you.
When I think of you. Beloved,
I see a smooth and stately garden
With parterres of gold and crimson tulips
And bursting lilac leaves.
There is a low-lipped basin in the midst.
Where a statue of veined cream marble
Perpetually pours water over her shoulder
From a rounded urn.
When the wind blows.
The water-stream blows before it
And spatters into the basin with a light tinkling.
And your shawl — the colour of red violets —
Flares out behind you in great curves
Like the swirling draperies of a painted Madonna.
When I looked into your eyes,
I saw a garden
With peonies, and tinkling pagodas.
And round-arched bridges
Over still lakes.
A woman sat beside the water
In a rain-blue, silken garment.
She reached through the water
To pluck the crimson peonies
Beneath the surface.
But as she grasped the stems,
They jarred and broke into white-green ripples
And as she drew out her hand.
The water-drops dripping from it
Stained her rain-blue dress like tears.