Works

Down the stone stairs
Girls with their large eyes wide with tragedy
Lift looks of shocked and momentous emotion up at me.
And I smile.

Ladies
Stepping like birds with their bright and pointed feet...

No, now I wish the sunshine would stop, and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out between two valves of darkness; the darkness falling, the dark...

The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter;
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.
...

Yesterday the fields were only grey with scattered snow,
And now the longest grass-leaves hardly emerge;
Yet her deep footsteps mark the snow, and go
On towards the pines at the hills' white verge.
...

You know what it is to be born alone,
Baby tortoise!
The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell,
Not yet awake,
And remain lapsed on earth,
Not quite alive.
...

And because you love me
think you you do not hate me?
Ha, since you love me to ecstasy
it follows you hate me to ecstasy.

Because when you hear me
go down the road outside the house...

So you are lost to me!
Ah you, you ear of corn straight lying,
What food is this for the darkly flying
Fowls of the Afterwards!

White bread afloat on the waters,
Cast out by the hand that scatters...

Charity.

By the river
In the black wet night as the furtive rain slinks down,
Dropping and starting from sleep
Alone on a seat
A woman crouches.

I must go back to her.
...

She speaks.
Look at the little darlings in the corn!
The rye is taller than you, who think yourself
So high and mighty: look how the heads are borne
Dark and proud on the sky, like a number of knights...

The new red houses spring like plants
In level rows
Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants
Its square shadows.

The pink young houses show one side bright
Flatly assuming the sun,...

Clerks.

We have shut the doors behind us, and the velvet flowers of night
Lean about us scattering their pollen grains of golden light.

Now at last we lift our faces, and our faces come aflower...

My love lies underground
With her face upturned to mine,
And her mouth unclosed in a last long kiss
That ended her life and mine.

I dance at the Christmas party
Under the mistletoe...

A blotch of pallor stirs beneath the high
Square picture-dusk, the window of dark sky.

A sound subdued in the darkness: tears!
As if a bird in difficulty up the valley steers.
...

I look at the swaling sunset
And wish I could go also
Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.

I wish that I could go
Through the red doors where I could put off...

Yours is the shame and sorrow
But the disgrace is mine;
Your love was dark and thorough,
Mine was the love of the sun for a flower
He creates with his shine.

I was diligent to explore you,...

The clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly northward to you,
While north of them all, at the farthest ends, stands one bright-bosomed, aglance...

You promised to send me some violets. Did you forget?
White ones and blue ones from under the orchard hedge?
Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a pledge
Of our early love that hardly has opened yet....

How many times, like lotus lilies risen
Upon the surface of a river, there
Have risen floating on my blood the rare
Soft glimmers of my hope escaped from prison.

So I am clothed all over with the light...

The little pansies by the road have turned
Away their purple faces and their gold,
And evening has taken all the bees from the thyme,
And all the scent is shed away by the cold.
...

I don't care whether I am beautiful to you
You other women.
Nothing of me that you see is my own;
A man balances, bone unto bone
Balances, everything thrown
In the scale, you other women.
...