Classic Poem

I

Her face is not a mask, and yet it shows
Thought grown supernaturally coy
Between the curved fallacies of light and shade.
Her face is not a flower, yet it holds
Emotion so sportively tossing,
So tinctured with the daring purities
Mistaken for exotic flimsiness,
That flowers find a friend within its flesh.

II

Look into her eyes
Hour after hour,
Never glancing to the right or left,
And at last you will see her soul —
An unobtrusive opulence
Of steady light below
The more susceptible, revised
Lights within her blackguard eyes.

III

O taciturn, sheer vagabond
Living in her heart,
You have journeyed on too many roads
To voice a babbling love or hate
For what you have touched and spied.
Dullness and necromancies
Trail out into a soft
Unimportance in your memory . . . .

All you have left is a trick
Picked up on some forgotten road —
The trick with which you turn
Lolling to all the slow and fearless art,
Immune to all the shrinking haste of life.