Street Lamps
GOLD, with an innermost speck
Of silver, singing afloat
Beneath the night,
Like balls of thistle-down
Wandering up and down
Over the whispering town
Seeking where to alight!
Slowly, above the street
Above the ebb of feet
Drifting in flight;
Still, in the purple distance
The gold of their strange persistence
As they cross and part and meet
And pass out of sight!
The seed-ball of the sun
Is broken at last, and done
Is the orb of day.
Now to the separate ends
Seed after day-seed wends
A separate way.
No sun will ever rise
Again on the wonted skies
In the midst of the spheres.
The globe of the day, over-ripe,
Is shattered at last beneath the stripe
Of the wind, and its oneness veers
Out myriad-wise.
Seed after seed after seed
Drifts over the town, in its need
To sink and have done;
To settle at last in the dark,
To bury its weary spark
Where the end is begun.
Darkness, and depth of sleep,
Nothing to know or to weep
Where the seed sinks in
To the earth of the under-night
Where all is silent, quite
Still, and the darknesses steep
Out all the sin.
“SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME” SHE said as well to me: “Why are you ashamed? That little bit of your chest that shows between the gap of your shirt, why cover it up? Why shouldn’t your legs and your good strong thighs be rough and hairy?—I’m glad they are like that. You are shy, you silly, you silly shy thing. Men are the shyest creatures, they never will come out of their covers. Like any snake slipping into its bed of dead leaves, you hurry into your clothes. And I love you so! Straight and clean and all of a piece is the body of a man, such an instrument, a spade, like a spear, or an oar, such a joy to me—” So she laid her hands and pressed them down my sides, so that I began to wonder over myself, and what I was.
She said to me: “What an instrument, your body! single and perfectly distinct from everything else! What a tool in the hands of the Lord! Only God could have brought it to its shape. It feels as if his handgrasp, wearing you had polished you and hollowed you, hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped you under the breasts and brought you to the very quick of your form, subtler than an old, soft-worn fiddle-bow.
“When I was a child, I loved my father’s riding-whip that he used so often. I loved to handle it, it seemed like a near part of him. So I did his pens, and the jasper seal on his desk. Something seemed to surge through me when I touched them.
“So it is with you, but here The joy I feel! God knows what I feel, but it is joy! Look, you are clean and fine and singled out! I admire you so, you are beautiful: this clean sweep of your sides, this firmness, this hard mould! I would die rather than have it injured with one scar. I wish I could grip you like the fist of the Lord, and have you—”
So she said, and I wondered,
feeling trammelled and hurt.
It did not make me free.
Now I say to her: “No tool, no instrument, no God! Don’t touch me and appreciate me. It is an infamy. You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence as it lifts its straight white throat. Your hand would not be so flig and easy. Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder, curled up in the sunshine like a princess; when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder you did not stretch forward to caress her though she looked rarely beautiful and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity. And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face, you are afraid if he rises to his feet, though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a monolith, arrested, static.
“Is there nothing in me to make you hesitate?
I tell you there is all these.
And why should you overlook them in me?—”