himBalanced in glorious equilibrium,
The swinging beauty of equilibrium,
You other women.
There's this other beauty, the way of the stars
You straggling women.
If you knew how I swerve in peace, in the equipoise
With the man, if you knew how my flesh enjoys
The swinging bliss no shattering ever destroys
You other women:
You would envy me, you would think me wonderful
Beyond compare;
You would weep to be lapsing on such harmony
As carries me, you would wonder aloud that he
Who is so strange should correspond with me
Everywhere.
You see he is different, he is dangerous,
Without pity or love.
And yet how his separate being liberates me
And gives me peace! You cannot see
How the stars are moving in surety
Exquisite, high above.
We move without knowing, we sleep, and we
travel on,
You other women.
And this is beauty to me, to be lifted and gone
In a motion human inhuman, two and one
Encompassed, and many reduced to none,
You other women.
KENSINGTON
People
THE great gold apples of night
Hang from the street's long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.
The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me
Makes sickening the white
Ghost-flux of faces that hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by
Without meaning or reason why
They ever should be.
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
