They bring her thoughts like birds
And very funny words
And mountainous decisions
And things to make you cry.
But, after all, it's airy
In the house of a fairy,
With a face like that to sob to
And those arms close by.
I lived once with a fairy.
I was wild and contrary.
I'm still wild and contrary.
But her heart's a heart for two.
She sees rooms of starry graces,
Kind firelight on our faces,
And a watch on sleeping fairies,
And the fairy home come true.
Once again, with gentle evening
And the dreaming trees, come true.
IN TIME OF TROUBLE
In memory of your desolate eyes I know
That words are words, with nothing to gainsay
The testimony of pain, the heavy day;
But searching in the ruins of overthrow
I gathered you this wreath that now I show;
Small and barbaric brightness on the gray,—
Glimmering irony, perhaps. I lay
It down before your eyes, and softly go.
You are a vista blundered on in Arden
Where the fool grasps his bells, that he may hark;
A sudden skyward path where cliffs are warden
Of waves that foam to reach a high tide-mark;
Whisper of blossoms in a midnight garden;
A fountain whitely flowering on the dark.
ANOMALY
Men who are fain to change, look wizenedly
Into the flowing mirror of your thought
And see on what strange reefs your joys are caught
And contemplate your vexed variety:
Grief that was hooded for eternity
Casting the stole for spangled domino,
Awe on its pinnacle jigging heel and toe.
Love laughing into hate and mockery.
What shoots the warp to patterns that reblend
And spread and fade,—and working out what end?
In time of pain why be as voluble
As one who tells an endless useless sum,
Yet simple clay, pallid and deaf and dumb
Through the one moment forging Heaven or Hell?
THE LOVER
I rooted silver stars from heaven in showers,
Rived adamant to show an azure gap,
Captured the very Psyche in my cap,
Filched from the sack of Time six diamond hours.
Hyperborean in my crown of flowers
I ran and leapt the cliff of thunderclap
Plunging through green sea-light where bronze fronds wrap
Crumbling pearl palaces and coral bowers.