I seemed to feel your soft looks
Steal across that quiet evening room
Where once our souls spoke, long ago.
For that was of a vastness;
And this night is of a vastness . . .
There was a dog-bark then—
It was the sound
Of my rebellious and incredulous heart
Its patterns twined about the stars
And drew them down
And devoured them.
EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 45
AN angel, bringing incense, prays
Forever in that tree . . .
I go blind still when the locust sways
Those honey-domes for me.
All the fragrances of dew, O angel, are there,
The myrrhic rapture of young hair,
The lips of lust;
And all the stenches of dust,
Even the palm and the fingers of a hand burnt bare
With a curling sweet-smelling crust,
And the bitter staleness of old hair,
Powder on a withering bust . . .
The moon came through the window to our bed.
And the shadows of the locust-tree
On your white sweet body made of me,
Of my lips, a drunken bee. . . .
O tree-like Spring, O blossoming days,
I, who some day shall be dead,
Shall have ever a lover to sway with me.
For when my face decays
And the earth moulds in my nostrils, shall there not be
The breath therein of a locust-tree,
The seed, the shoot of a locust-tree,
The honey-domes of a locust-tree,
Till lovers go blind and sway with me?—
O tree-like Spring, O blossomy days,
To sway as long as the locust sways!
EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 14
BESIDE the brink of dream
I had put out my willow-roots and leaves
As by a stream
Too narrow for the invading greaves
Of Rome in her trireme . . .
Then you came—like a scream
Of beeves.