Classic Poem

(1)

I see you with my mind.
You are a swarm
Of dust,
A storm
Of timeless atoms blowing where they must,
From kind to crumbling kind.

I see you with my hands.
You are the earth.
The frame,
The girth,
Of all that is and is always the same,
And through all ruin stands.

I see you with my eyes.
You are my love,
You change,
You move,
You are alive and like all living strange
That being different dies.

(2)

She was not strange, but patterned from that plan
Perfected in the worm and still rehearsed
In fishes and all furred and feathered cursed
By fur and feather to be unlike Man,—
A hollow cylinder hooped in with bone
Projecting sidewise to isosceles,
A simple tube, but modified to ease
The seed that must not die till it be sown.

And this new marvel, this long lovely line,
This melody, this mute Alcaic curve
From thigh to throat was still the Egg's design
To propagate leviathan and serve
The toad's eternity,—and only fine
Because he chose, and chose to misdivine.

(3)

Man is immortal, for his flesh is earth,
And save he lives forever—why, he dies:
Woman is mortal, for her flesh will rise
In each new generation of her birth.
She is the tree; we are the feverish
Vain leaves that gild her summer with our own,
And fall and rot when summer's overblown,
And wish eternity and have—our wish.

And man, immortal, marries his own dreams
Of immortality in flesh and blood,
And mortal woman, wiser than she seems,
Marries her man for evil or for good,—
Wherein perception sees what reason blurs:
She was not his, but he was only hers.

(4)

O hide your eyes,
O turn your head away;
Are you so wise, so wise,
To watch unchanged this chemistry of clay?

It is not we,
It is another two;
Hide that you may not see
What flushed unlovely things their bodies do.

O think no grace
That I am glad of this:
I do not know your face,
It is not you but my own flesh I kiss.
Blind, blind your brow
And your too candid eyes:
You cannot love me now,
You cannot love what even love denies.

(5)

This was not love but love's true negative
That spends itself in passion to be spent,
And lives no longer than the wish may live
To waste itself and then is impotent.
And fails not only but confounds in fault
What love most lives upon, the very need,
The lack, the famine, the too thirsty salt,
Till wanting want love has no will to feed.

Yet, in the glut and surfeit of desire
Desire itself was perfected and found,
And fever burned by its consuming fire
Was bare as martyrs' bones beneath the ground.
This was not love, the ever unpossessed,
But this was love of her made manifest.

(6)

Love is the way that lovers never know
Who know the shortest way to find their love,
And never turn aside and never go
By vales beneath nor by the hills above,
But running straight to the familiar door
Break sudden in and call their dear by name
And have their wish and so wish nothing more
And neither know nor trouble how they came.

Love is the path that comes to this same ease
Over the summit of the westward hill,
And feels the rolling of the earth and sees
The sun go down and hears the summer still,
And dips and follows where the orchards fall
And comes here late or never comes at all.

(7)

But love of her went wandering no mood
Of azure evening where the worm's slow spark
Kindled and dimmed and like enchantment stood
The spring's young moon upon the silver dark,
Nor followed any path that seeking her
Sought beauty first and would not find her breast
Save through old forests thick and loftier
Than guard the golden apples in the west.

She was the sky and country of his love,
The towns and towers and the outward farms,
And journeys in that land might only move
From her recalled to her recalling arms,
Where all horizons were attained and dear
Before he thought them far or wished them near.

(8)

Whom do you love, she said, when you look out
So far beyond my eyes as our eyes meet?
Is she so like and yet unlike you doubt
If I'm the counterfeit or she's the cheat?
Or is she some one that I never was?
Or what I was and shall not be again?
Back of your eyes I think her image has
Not only longing and much more than pain.

She never had another's face but this,
He laughed and touched her cheek. She moved as you,
And spoke upon your tongue and used your kiss,
And knew the mysteries your wisdom knew,
And had your silence, and was called your name—
But was not I myself—was not the same!

(9)

As like, he said, as what we see of it
Is like and wider than the unseen sea—
Wider because the sea's not infinite
But banked and shored from possibility,
While what we see, because we cannot know
From maps or charts how far it should extend,
Is greater than the ocean and may flow
Over horizons till horizons end.

You have no bounds to me but my defect
Of eyes to see if there is more beyond,
And if I watch as they do who expect
Some sign, some drift of green, some lily frond
Borne out of unknown Indies in the west,
I watch your sea for shores you've not confessed.

(10)

But there are times, she said, when you forget,
Lying within the circle of my sky
To watch horizons, and our eyes have met
After a kiss when it was only I
You saw or wished to see, and you have caught
Sometimes and held me when your eyes were blind
For seeing farther than the thing they sought
Which was not farther than the flesh could find.

Were you not happy then?
Ah, happier
Forgetting you and using what you seemed
Than thinking stubbornly what else you were,
And happier forgetting I had dreamed
Than dreaming I should find what I shall not—
Till I remembered that I had forgot.

(11)

Throwing a careless pebble in the lake
She saw the clear sky crumple and the hill
Waver and reel and all the sunlight spill
In swimming circles and the willows shake,
And watching said: You say love cannot die,
But there's a lovely world has had an end.
And when he laughed and said the sky would mend
She said: And that would be another sky.

And then: Oh, yes, the image will return
Being an image—yet the sky has tumbled
However bright the sky itself may burn—
That cannot fall you say? Her fingers fumbled
Against his arm and in the touch he knew
Her heart had guessed the truth that was not true.

(12)

They say to themselves, we will think of the time that was.

Withdraws
The mist momentarily, flows
The dark down and away; and they muse
On a pattern of sky and a leaf there that blows.
And a happiness, sudden, unmeaning, unmeant, without cause,
Arises, renews,
In that leaf, in that pattern of sky and there gathers and grows.
They say to themselves, Ah, then we were happy, love knows:
But shall we be happy again if we choose
A pattern of sky and a leaf there that blows,
As then, on the hurrying flaws,
When happiness was?