Identity

L' aura soave ch' al sol spiega e vibra.

HIS HEART LIES TANGLED IN HER HAIR.


    The pleasant gale, that to the sun unplaits
And spreads the gold Love's fingers weave, and braid
O'er her fine eyes, and all around her head,
Fetters my heart, the wishful sigh creates:
No nerve but thrills, no artery but beats,
Approaching my fair arbiter with dread,
Who in her doubtful scale hath ofttimes weigh'd
Whether or death or life on me awaits;
Beholding, too, those eyes their fires display,
And on those shoulders shine such wreaths of hair,
Whose witching tangles my poor heart ensnare.
But how this magic's wrought I cannot say;
For twofold radiance doth my reason blind,
And sweetness to excess palls and o'erpowers my mind.

NOTT.

...

LONDON
Used to wear her lights splendidly,
Flinging her shawl-fringe over the River,
Tassels in abandon.

And up in the sky
A two-eyed clock, like an owl
Solemnly used to approve, chime, chiming,
Approval, goggle-eyed fowl.

There are no gleams on the River,
No goggling clock;
No sound from St. Stephen's;
No lamp-fringed frock.

Instead,
Darkness, and skin-wrapped
Fleet, hurrying limbs,
Soft-footed dead.

London
Original, wolf-wrapped
In pelts of wolves, all her luminous
Garments gone.

London, with hair
Like a forest darkness, like a marsh
Of rushes, ere the Romans
Broke in her lair.

It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses
Has broken her spell.

Space and dread and the dark -
Over a livid stretch of sky
Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train
Of huge, primeval presences
Stooping beneath the weight
Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;
While in the haunting loneliness
The far sea waits and wanders with a sound
As of the trailing skirts of Destiny,
Passing unseen
To some immitigable end
With her grey henchman, Death.

What larve, what spectre is this
Thrilling the wilderness to life
As with the bodily shape of Fear?
What but a desperate sense,
A strong foreboding of those dim
Interminable continents, forlorn
And many-silenced, in a dusk
Inviolable utterly, and dead
As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes
In hugger-mugger through eternity?

Life - lif...

I fear no earthly powers,
But care for crowns of flowers;
And love to have my beard
With wine and oil besmear'd.
This day I'll drown all sorrow:
Who knows to live to-morrow?

I

"Poor wanderer," said the leaden sky,
"I fain would lighten thee,
But there be laws in force on high
Which say it must not be."

II

- "I would not freeze thee, shorn one," cried
The North, "knew I but how
To warm my breath, to slack my stride;
But I am ruled as thou."

III

- "To-morrow I attack thee, wight,"
Said Sickness. "Yet I swear
I bear thy little ark no spite,
But am bid enter there."

IV

- "Come hither, Son," I heard Death say;
"I did not will a grave
Should end thy pilgrimage to-day,
But I, too, am a slave!"

V

We smiled upon each other then,
And life to me wore less
That fell contour it wore ere when
They owned their passiveness.

        Only a simple rhyme of love and sorrow,
    Where "blisses" rhymed with "kisses," "heart," with "dart:"
        Yet, reading it, new strength I seemed to borrow,
    To live on bravely and to do my part.

        A little rhyme about a heart that's bleeding -
    Of lonely hours and sorrow's unrelief:
        I smiled at first; but there came with the reading
    A sense of sweet companionship in grief.

        The selfishness of my own woe forsaking,
    I thought about the singer of that song.
        Some other breast felt this same weary aching;
    Another found the summer days too long.

        The few sad lines, my sorrow so expressing,
    I read, and on the singer, all unknown,
        I breathed a fervent though a silent blessing,

The taste of an apple,
the cringing of a bee
as sun stops turning
a ladle over their skins;
the fire gold stains
on apple's skin,
the honey yellow, black bits
a hornet wrinkles in.

He has a name which can’t be brought
Within the sphere of metre;
But, as he’s Peter by report,
I’ll trot him out as Peter.

I call him mine; but don’t suppose
That I’m his dad, O reader!
My wife has got a Norman nose
She reads the tales of Ouida.

I never loved a nigger belle
My tastes are too aesthetic!
The perfume from a gin is well,
A rather strong emetic.

But, seeing that my theme is Pete,
This verse will be the neater
If I keep on the proper beat,
And stick throughout to Peter.

We picked him up the Lord knows where!
At noon we came across him
Asleep beside a hunk of bear
His paunch was bulged with ’possum.

(Last stanza will not bear, I own,
A pressure analytic;
But bard whose weight is fourteen sto...

Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.

In the age of gold,
Free from winter's cold,
Youth and maiden bright,
To the holy light,
Naked in the sunny beams delight.

Once a youthful pair,
Filled with softest care,
Met in garden bright
Where the holy light
Had just removed the curtains of the night.

Then, in rising day,
On the grass they play;
Parents were afar,
Strangers came not near,
And the maiden soon forgot her fear.

Tired with kisses sweet,
They agree to meet
When the silent sleep
Waves o'er heaven's deep,
And the weary tired wanderers weep.

To her father white
Came the maiden bright;
But his lovi...

To-night I hunger so,
Beloved one, to know
If you recall and crave again the dream
That haunted our canoe,
And wove its witchcraft through
Our hearts as 'neath the northern night we sailed the northern stream.

Ah! dear, if only we
As yesternight could be
Afloat within that light and lonely shell,
To drift in silence till
Heart-hushed, and lulled and still
The moonlight through the melting air flung forth its fatal spell.

The dusky summer night,
The path of gold and white
The moon had cast across the river's breast,
The shores in shadows clad,
The far-away, half-sad
Sweet singing of the whip-poor-will, all soothed our souls to rest.

You trusted I could feel
My arm as strong as steel,
So still your upturned face, so calm you...

Wunst I sassed my Pa, an' he
Won't stand that, an' punished me, -
Nen when he was gone that day,
I slipped out an' runned away.

I tooked all my copper-cents,
An' clumbed over our back fence
In the jimpson-weeds 'at growed
Ever'where all down the road.

Nen I got out there, an' nen
I runned some - an' runned again
When I met a man 'at led
A big cow 'at shooked her head.

I went down a long, long lane
Where was little pigs a-play'n';
An' a grea'-big pig went "Booh!"
An' jumped up, an' skeered me too.

Nen I scampered past, an' they
Was somebody hollered "Hey!"
An' I ist looked ever'where,
An' they was nobody there.

I Want to, but I'm 'fraid to try
To go back.... An' by-an'-by
Somepin' hurts my throa...

Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sign still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpil...

Where a river roars in rapids
And doves in maples fret,
Where peace has decked the pastures
Our guardian angels met.

Long they had sought each other
In God's mysterious name,
Had climbed the solemn chaos tides
Alone, with hope aflame:

Amid the demon deeps had wound
By many a fearful way.
As they beheld each other
Their shout made glad the day.

No need of purse delayed them,
No hand of friend or kin -
Nor menace of the bell and book,
Nor fear of mortal sin.

You did not speak, my girl,
At this, our parting hour.
Long we held each other
And watched their deeds of power.

They made a curious Eden.
We saw that it was good.
We thought with them in unison.
We proudly understood

Their amaranth ...

    Dream not of love, to think it like
    What waking love may prove to be,
    For I dreamed so and broke my heart,
    When my false lover slighted me.

    Love, like to flowers, is sweet when green;
    The rose in bud aye best appears;
    And she that loves a handsome man
    Should have more wit than she has years.

    I put my finger in a bush,
    Thinking the sweeter rose to find;
    I pricked my finger to the bone,
    And left the sweetest rose behind.

    I threw a stone into the sea,
    And deep it sunk into the sand,
    And so did my poor heart in me
    When my false lover left the land.

    I watched the sun an hour too soon
    Set into clouds behind the town;
    So my false lover left, and said
   ...

Come down and dance ye in the toil
Of pleasures to a heat;
But if to moisture, let the oil
Of roses be your sweat.

Not only to yourselves assume
These sweets, but let them fly
From this to that, and so perfume
E'en all the standers by;

As goddess Isis, when she went
Or glided through the street,
Made all that touched her, with her scent,
And whom she touched, turn sweet.

Deep in a valley, green with ancient beech,
And wandered through of one small, silent stream,
Whose bear-grassed banks bristled with brush and burr,
Tick-trefoil and the thorny marigold,
Bush-clover and the wahoo, hung with pods,
And mass on mass of bugled jewelweed,
Horsemint and doddered ragweed, dense, unkempt,
I came upon a charcoal-burner's hut,
Abandoned and forgotten long ago;
His hut and weedy pit, where once the wood
Smouldered both day and night like some wild forge,
A wildwood forge, glaring as wild-cat eyes.

A mossy roof, black, fallen in decay,
And rotting logs, exuding sickly mold
And livid fungi, and the tottering wreck,
Rude remnants, of a chimney, clay and sticks,
Were all that now remained to say that once,
In time not so remote, o...

Summer, gowned in catnip-gray,
Goes her weedy wildwood way,
Where with rosehip-buttoned coat,
Cardinal flower-plume afloat,
With the squirrel-folk at play,
Brown September, smiling, stands,
Chieftain of the Romany bands
Of the Fall a gypsy crew,
Glimmering in lobelia-blue,
Gold and scarlet down the lands.
Summer, with a redbird trill,
Dares him follow at her will,
There to romp in tree and vine,
Drink the sunset's crimson wine,
And on beauty feast his fill.
He his Autumn whistle takes,
And his dark hair backward shakes;
Pipes a note, and bids her on,
Dancing like a woodland faun,
And she follows through the brakes.
She must follow: she is bound
By the wildness of the sound.
Is it love or necromance?
Down the world he leads th...

Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.