_FROHNLEICHNAM_
You have come your way, I have come my way;
You have stepped across your people, carelessly,
hurting them all;
I have stepped across my people, and hurt them
in spite of my care.
But steadily, surely, and notwithstanding
We have come our ways and met at last
Here in this upper room.
Here the balcony
Overhangs the street where the bullock-wagons
slowly
Go by with their loads of green and silver birch-
trees
For the feast of Corpus Christi.
Here from the balcony
We look over the growing wheat, where the jade-
green river
Goes between the pine-woods,
Over and beyond to where the many mountains
Stand in their blueness, flashing with snow and the
morning.
I have done; a quiver of exultation goes through
me, like the first
Breeze of the morning through a narrow white
birch.
You glow at last like the mountain tops when they
catch
Day and make magic in heaven.
At last I can throw away world without end, and
meet you
Unsheathed and naked and narrow and white;
At last you can throw immortality off, and I see you
Glistening with all the moment and all your
beauty.
Shameless and callous I love you;
Out of indifference I love you;
Out of mockery we dance together,
Out of the sunshine into the shadow,
Passing across the shadow into the sunlight,
Out of sunlight to shadow.
As we dance
Your eyes take all of me in as a communication;
As we dance
I see you, ah, in full!
Only to dance together in triumph of being together
Two white ones, sharp, vindicated,
Shining and touching,
Is heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation.
_IN THE DARK_
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.
"Why have you gone to the window? Why don't
you sleep?
How you have wakened me! But why, why do
you weep?"
_"I am afraid of you, I am afraid, afraid!
There is something in you destroys me--!"_
"You have dreamed and are not awake, come here
to me."
_"No, I have wakened. It is you, you are cruel to
me!"_
"My dear!"--_"Yes, yes, you are cruel to me. You
cast
A shadow over my breasts that will kill me at last."_
"Come!"--_"No, I'm a thing of life. I give
You armfuls of sunshine, and you won't let me live."_
"Nay, I'm too sleepy!"--_"Ah, you are horrible;
You stand before me like ghosts, like a darkness
upright."_
"I!"--_"How can you treat me so, and love me?
My feet have no hold, you take the sky from above me."_
"My dear, the night is soft and eternal, no doubt
You love it!"--_"It is dark, it kills me, I am put out."_
"My dear, when you cross the street in the sun-
shine, surely
Your own small night goes with you. Why treat
it so poorly?"
_"No, no, I dance in the sun, I'm a thing of life--"_
"Even then it is dark behind you. Turn round,
my wife."
_"No, how cruel you are, you people the sunshine
With shadows!"_--"With yours I people the
sunshine, yours and mine--"
"In the darkness we all are gone, we are gone
with the trees
And the restless river;--we are lost and gone
with all these."
_"But I am myself, I have nothing to do with these."_
"Come back to bed, let us sleep on our mys-
teries.
"Come to me here, and lay your body by mine,
And I will be all the shadow, you the shine.
"Come, you are cold, the night has frightened you.
Hark at the river! It pants as it hurries through
"The pine-woods. How I love them so, in their
mystery of not-to-be."
_"--But let me be myself, not a river or a tree."_
"Kiss me! How cold you are!--Your little breasts
Are bubbles of ice. Kiss me!--You know how
it rests
"One to be quenched, to be given up, to be gone
in the dark;
To be blown out, to let night dowse the spark.
"But never mind, my love. Nothing matters,
save sleep;
Save you, and me, and sleep; all the rest will
keep."