XXIII
Whenever a love dies within you,
Griefs, phosphorescent with unborn tears,
Cut the glowing hush of a meadow within you:
Griefs striking their pearl-voiced cymbals
And shaping the silences once held by your love.
Your new love blows a trumpet of sunlight
Into the meadow, and your griefs
Leap into the echo and return to you.
XXIV
We blew a luminous confusion of thoughts
Upon the silence of our souls,
Staining it to little, weeping tints.
Our hands pressed serpentine pain into each other
And stroked it away to twilights of relief.
Our lips shook before the tread of coming words,
But closed again, finding no need for them.
XXV
Upon an arched sarcophagus of pain
Are figures painted in arrested embraces
With outlines so light that we must bend close to see:
Old loves almost merging to one tone
Of pale regret that holds
An inner glow of dead weeping.
Our lips cling and our breath winds to a hand
With touch like summer rain
Blending the arrested figures upon the arched sarcophagus of pain.
XXVI
Make of your voice, a dawn
Dropping little gestures upon my forehead,
While slumber-edged thoughts rise in my head
And wave back greetings droll and confused.
Pain has jested with the whirling night
And both vanish like an untold prayer,
So, make of your voice, a dawn
Dropping little gestures upon my forehead.
XXVII
Your mind is a little, clandestine pastel
Shaped into a posture of rigid grief.
Its colors huddle together
And make a stunted, aching lyric....
Ah frail-flowered moment preceding reality—
Your eyelids open; the little pastel dies.