I love the sex-passion which is in this witching Body of me. I love
to feel its portent grow and creep over me, like a climbing vine of
tiny red roses, in the occasional dusks.
It is no shame or shadow or sordidness: but beauty and sweetness and
light.
no token of sin: a token of virtue.
no thing to crush: rather to nurture, to garner.
no thing to forget: to remember, to think about.
no flat weak drawn-out prose: live potent clipped heated poetry.
not common and loosely human: rare and divine.
not fat daily soup: stinging wine of life.
not valueless because born of nothing and nowhere: valuable,
priceless, a treasure under lock and key.
Sex-desire comes wandering in dusk-time and gulfs me as in a swift
violent sweet-smelling whirlwind. It goes away sudden-variant as it
came, out of a region of hot quick shadows.
And for that, for hours and days afterward, oranges and apples look
brighter-colored to my eyes: hammocks swing easier as I sit in them:
rugs feel softer to my feet: the black dresses lend themselves
gentler to my form: pencils slide faciler on paper: my voice speaks
less difficultly into telephones: meanings sound super-vibrant in
Keats’s Odes: sugar--little pinches of granulated sugar--are shaper,
sweeter-sweeter in my throat.
And God grows less remote. And my wooden coffin and deep wet yellow
clay grave move a long way back from me.
--all from fleeting ungratified wish of sly sex-tissues--
Also in it, and in my life from it, I sense some deathly pathos.
_The necklace_