THE FEMALE GOD
We curl into your eyes—
They drink our fires and have never drained;
In the fierce forest of your hair
Our desires beat blindly for their treasure.
In your eyes’ subtle pit,
Far down, glimmer our souls;
And your hair like massive forest trees
Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb.
Like a candle lost in an electric glare
Our spirits tread your eyes’ infinities;
In the wrecking waves of your tumultuous locks
Do you not hear the moaning of our pulses?
Queen! Goddess! Animal!
In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls?
When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow
Do not our jealous pulses wake between?
You have dethroned the ancient God,
You have usurped his Sabbath, his common days;
Yea, every moment is delivered to you,
Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God!
Our souls have passed into your eyes,
Our days into your hair;
And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world,
Your world.
GOD
In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls:
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay—a bullying hulk—to crush them more;
But when one fearless turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard,
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking;
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep,
And when the cats come out the rats are sly,
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.
But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange; and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! If the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us; but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it,
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through
Where blind farewells are taken easily.
Ah, this miasma of a rotting God!
SLEEP
Godhead’s lip hangs
When our pulses have no golden tremors,
And his whips are flicked by mice
And all star-amorous things.
Drops, drops of shivering quiet
Filter under my lids.
Now only am I powerful.
What though the cunning gods outwit us here
In daytime and in playtime,
Surely they feel the gyves we lay on them
In our sleep.
O, subtle gods lying hidden!
O, gods with your oblique eyes!
Your elbows in the dawn, and wrists
Bright with the afternoon,
Do you not shake when a mortal slides
Into your own unvexed peace?
When a moving stillness breaks over your knees
(An emanation of piled æons’ pressures),
From our bodies flat and straight,
And your limbs are locked,
Futilely gods,
And shut your sinister essences?
MY DAYS
My days are but the tombs of buried hours;
Which tombs are hidden in the pilèd years;
But from the mounds there spring up many flowers,
Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears.
Time, like a sexton, pileth mould on mould,
Minutes on minutes till the tombs are high;
But from the dust there fall some grains of gold,
And the dead corpse leaves what will never die—
It may be but a thought, the nursling seed
Of many thoughts, of many a high desire;
Some little act that stirs a noble deed,
Like breath rekindling a smouldering fire:
They only live who have not lived in vain,
For in their works their life returns again.