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.