Said I: ‘Was I sometime a married woman?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were--in four separate ages. Which brought you
and me singular solitude.’
Said I: ‘Was I always woman?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were once a young lad of fierce temper and were
at twenty a madman. And died mad. No male body and brain could
withstand and outface merely the emotional besiegings of _you_.’
Said I: ‘When I went mad, what of you?’
Said the Soul: ‘I fell asleep, and knew no rest, but dreamed.’
Said I: ‘Of what?’
Said the Soul: ‘Things I always dreamed in your mad lapses--poetry
served very conscious and very hot: the material Color of the
Sunshine: the musical Softness of the Dawns: the pulsing Thoughts in
Girls’ Throats: the Scent of Water-Falls.’
The Soul has an airless voice which tells her meanings, beside her
words and in their rhythm.
Said I: ‘What do you, and how do you, with me now?’
Said the Soul: ‘I grow tired with you. Exasperated. Desperate. As if
I too wore flesh. You are a deathly prison, a torture chamber. I turn
everywhere and nowhere at all. You tire me--you wear me. I wait. I
stay. Yet I move.’
She looked lovely, my Soul--and quite in and of this bitter-ish
lovely world in its bloody bitter wrappings of bone and flesh. Around
her neck was the Necklace she wore in all the ages, showing greenish
in a dusk of gentian blue.--
All of it slyly garbles and cross-purposes me a little bit more than
usual.