II
A MEMORY of tears that day,
Of small and piteous lives misused:
The fallen bird we could not save,
The butterfly we helped—and bruised.
And last, to fill repentant eyes,
Most bright and frail of winged things—
A moment’s faith, an hour’s love,
Grieving the dust with broken wings.
A MISTY MORNING
LOW-arched above me as I moved the hollowed air was clear;
Beyond was whiteness dim and strange, and spectral shapes drew near.
Upon the little shore of brown that touched the misty sea,
Upon the shadowy borderland, one paused and looked at me;
Then hurried on with greeting smile and sudden vivid face:
A friend had started into life within my magic space!
Into the world of ghosts again I watched him fade away—
First black he was, then dim he was, then merged in formless grey.
TWO SONGS
YOU love the chant of green,
The low-voiced trees, the meadow’s monotone.
O friend of mine, it is for these you pray.
This alien land must call unheard, unseen,
While one beloved note your heart has known,
To hunger for it, half a world away.
Come with me to my height,
And stand at sunset when the winds are still,
Watching the hollow valleys brim with light,
The red and brown and yellow hills—they shout,
And on the shoulders of the marching host
The bayonets are gleaming points of white.
Pressing beyond to deep and gradual blues,
Their lessening voices die in distance pale—
Ineffably dissolved in opal hues;
Against the sky the last sweet echoes fail
While all the West is quivering, fold on fold
To one great voice—one vibrant peal of gold.
NOON
THE brook flowed through a bending arch of leaves—
Flowed through an arch of leaves into the sun;
But all was shadow where it left my feet—
A shade with netted ripples overrun,
A brook that flowed in coolness to the sun.
Beyond the arch of shadow color lay—
Vivid to narrowed eyelids, fiercely bright,
And bright the happy water slipped away
In gleaming pools and broken lines of light.
YOUR BEAUTIFUL PASSING
ACROSS my thought has trailed your beautiful passing,
As a wild bird ruffles the motionless brink of the water,
Moving in gradual path on its mirror of shadow,
After him streaking and trembling long ripples of silver.
BY MOONLIGHT
IS this the world I knew? Beneath the day
It glowed with golden heat, with vivid hues—
Mountains and sky that merged in melting blues
And hazy air that shimmered far away.
This world is white beneath a silver sky—
White with pale brightness, luminously chill.
The moon reigns queen, but faintly shining still
The dim stars glimmer on the hilltops high.
Here, where long grasses touch across the stream
That threads with babbling laugh its narrow way,
My face turned upward to pale gleams that stray
Through whispering willow boughs ... I dream and dream.
ONE DAY
THE levels where the trail began
Were sown with silver-grey.
We bruised the leaves with hurrying feet
To wafts of strong and tarry sweet,
A moment’s pleasure as we ran,
Forgotten on our way.
Above, along the farthest crest,
In every brief and breathless rest
The spice of sage was ours,
Crushed from the dull and slender leaves—
The tiny yellow flowers,
When day was done
No more remembered than the wind and sun.
THE MISSION GRAVES
BY man forgotten,
Nature remembers, with her fitful tears.
The wooden slabs lose name and date with years,
And crumble, rotten.
The Padre there,
On Saint’s day, from an evening rite returning,
Set for each unknown soul a candle burning,
With muttered prayer.
Glow-worms, they shone—
Strange, spectral-gleaming through the lonely dark.
Whose nameless dust did each faint glimmer mark—
Skull, crumbling bone?
Ah, the Dead knew!
The grateful Dead, far-called from voids of space,
Each by the tiny spark that gave him grace,
Watched, the night through.
ALONG THE TRACK
THE track has led me out beyond the town
To follow day across the waning fields,
The crisping weeds and wastes of tender brown.
On either side the feathered tops are high,
A tracery of broken arabesques
Upon the sullen crimson of the sky.
Into the west the narrowing rails are sped.
They cut the crayon softness of the dusk
With thin converging gleams of bloody red.
A PLACE OF DREAMS
HERE will we drink content, comrade of mine—
Here, where the little stream, to meet the sun,
Flows down a yellow rock like yellow wine.
Here will we launch a leaf to distant shores,
And in it shut a word for Wonderland—
The blue Unknown beyond the sycamores.
THINK NOT, O LILIAS[7]
Think not, O Lilias, that the love of this night will endure in the sun. Hast thou beheld fungi, white, evil, rosy-lined, poisonous, shrivel in the eyes of day?
In this wilderness of strange hearts it is not thine alone that concerns me. Many brave hearts of men are more to me than thine. The hearts of men breathe deeply. As for thy heart, it runs from me, it is quicksilver, it does not concern me greatly.
“TO ROSY BUDS....”
TO rosy buds in orchards of the spring,
To melting clouds in endless deeps of air,
My love shall lift a swelling throat and sing,
Akin to all things fugitive and fair.
They shut love from his heaven and he sings?
But captive eyes are pitiful to see!
Oh, flashing sun on upward-beating wings—
Oh, tumbling notes of joy—my bird is free!
Dear love, forever strange, beloved most!
Dear fleeting buds, bear not your fruit and die!
Be this a path forever found and lost,
A drift of bloom upon an April sky.
YESTERDAY[8]
NOW all my thoughts were crisped and thinned
To elfin threads, to gleaming browns.
Like tawny grasses lean with wind
They drew your heart across the downs.
Your will of all the winds that blew
They drew across the world to me,
To thread my whimsey thoughts of you
Along the downs, above the sea.
Beneath a pool beyond the dune—
So green it was and amber-walled
A face would glimmer like a moon
Seen whitely through an emerald—
And there my mermaid fancy lay
And dreamed the light and you were one,
And flickered in her sea-weed’s sway
A broken largesse of the sun.
Above the world as evening fell
I made my heart into a sky,
And through a twilight like a shell
I saw the shining sea-gulls fly.
I found between the sea and land
And lost again, unwrit, unheard,
A song that fluttered in my hand
And vanished like a silver bird.
THE MOURNER
BECAUSE my love has wave and foam for speech,
And never words, and yearns as water grieves,
With white arms curving on a listless beach,
And murmurs inarticulate as leaves—
I am become beloved of the night—
Her huge sea-lands ineffable and far
Hold crouched and splendid Sorrow, eyed with light,
And Pain who beads his forehead with a star.
AVE ATQUE VALE
IT gathers where the moody sky is bending;
It stirs the air along familiar ways—
A sigh for strange things dear forever ending,
For beauty shrinking in these alien days.
Now nothing is the same, old visions move me:
I wander silent through the waning land,
And find for youth and little leaves to love me
The old, old lichen crumbling in my hand.
What shifting films of distance fold you, blind you,
This windy eve of dreams, I cannot tell.
I know they grope through some strange mist to find you,
My hands that give you Greeting and Farewell.
NOTES
[1] This poem, so distinctly prophetic, was written a year and four months before her death.
[2] “The Rose” was written for Mr. Porter Garnett on the occasion of his marriage.
[3] These lines were in response to a long telegram dispatched at night by a distant friend.
[4] Of this poem, “Just a Dog,” a letter says: “My cousin, who used often to play on the piano, died; and after his death his dog, when anyone touched the instrument, used to come from wherever he might be to see if the player were not his master. Then he would slink away again. The dog died after a few grieving months. I loved him, and made these verses.”
[5] “Mirage” is an endeavor to portray the alien attitude of one who had long vainly sought love.
[6] “My Nook” was written at the age of sixteen.
[7] “Think Not, O Lilias.” These prose lines were recalled out of a dream. They are included here because of their singular beauty.
[8] “Yesterday,” and “The Mourner” which follows it, are the last poems. “Ave atque Vale” was written some two years before.
The responsibility for these notes lies with Mr. Henry Anderson Lafler, who has edited this book. Thanks are due to Mr. George Sterling and Mr. Porter Garnett, who have lightened the labor of its preparation.