Be perfect--for I love thee more in thought
Than thou canst reach in every trivial day.
Since days are as the flowers on a wreath
That wither while we bind them each to each.
Only the soul is timeless, and no round of days
Can wall it in a little space of ground.
Sometimes our minds are cheated by the clock
And crave love, wisdom, joy within an hour,
But the patient spirit stands
Waiting the last fulfilment.
Around thy soul my thoughts are as garlands
Or as an endless rosary.
Be perfect! lest my psalm should falter
And my hands part from the unriveted faith
With Amen scarcely sighed.
1917
Bodies heaving like waves,
Sighing through the dishevelled tresses of foam,
The massive whiteness of limbs flung out of shadow,
Splashed with ecstasial moonlight,
Sculptured voluptuously in ephemeral marbles.
Lingering touch of fingers,
Cooler than the curving ringlets of spray
Fluting the new-blown petals of a shell,
And kisses murmuring as the lips of darkness
Against the ivory forehead of the moon.
1919
Your face to me is like a beautiful city
Dreaming forever by the rough wild sea,
And I the ship upon a wilderness of waves
Heavily laden with memories....
I roam over all the earth
Making rhymes of you, and singing songs,
Because your face will never let me rest,
Because I can not frame it in a star
Surrounded with my cloudy reveries,
Because I may not pluck it like a flower
To breathe the incense of its perfumed soul--
Your face is like the carved hilt of a sword
Whose sheath is in my breast!
1918
Oh! why will you not let me love you
Well enough?
You have plucked my blossoms,
Gathered the leaves
And revived them with water;
But all the tortuous roots
Delving for your spirit
In subterranean passions
With a blind unresting desire,
Have you felt them, have you known?
In the blackest night of sleep
Though I be sunk a thousand fathoms
In the cerulean depths of slow oblivion,
My soul still swims toward you
Against the envious pressure of the tide....
You who are so tired, so filled with sleep
That you would brush a rose-leaf from your cheek
Lest its heaviness should stir your rest,
How can you shoulder the weight of my great burden
That is too vast for me to bear alone?
I tell you
Love is no little thing,
No moth-winged Cupid painted on the air,
No thin flute music petaling the silence
As leaves that flutter from a cherry tree.
It is the thought that broods upon its death,
The dread of mountains looking to the storm
Ere shrieks of lightning cleave their breasts in twain.
It is the fire that pillars up the stars
To mix its flame with their eternal gold.
Oh, listen to me!
You shall hear my message sung from sphere to sphere
As star-dust pouring a path through Heaven.
You shall know me
In the pensive shadows of trees,
In the luminary phantoms
Reflected in the stillness of a lake;
In the arrows of sunlight shot through meshing leaves
And quivering in the moss;
In the abandoned play of breakers
Showering their crystals to the moon;
In the folly of rainbow dolphins.
I only ask of you
To be the diver in my deepest pool,
To bring from out its blue obscurity
The things my life has moulded unaware,
Treasures my passion and my hunger fashioned
In loneliness of prayer unlit by life,
Created out of nothing save myself
Within the blind fast silence of the soul.
1918
My devotion kneels to you,
Holding a candle to illumine your face.
My loneliness is your shadow
Along the solitary roads.
My passion is a book between your hands
Whose leaves are as the leaves of violets,
A volume of pressed flowers
Scenting your fingers though you read it not.
And my white faith
Is a silken surplice clothing you in peace.
1919