INSTEAD of pearls -- a wrought clasp -- a bracelet -- will you accept this? You know the script -- you will start, wonder: what is left, what phrase after last night? This: The world is yet unspoiled for you, you wait, expectant -- you are like the children who haunt your own steps for chance bits -- a comb that may have slipped, a gold tassle, unravelled, plucked from your scarf, twirled by your slight fingers into the street -- a flower dropped. Do not think me unaware, I who have snatched at you as the street-child clutched at the seed-pearls you spilt that hot day when your necklace snapped. Do not dream that I speak as one defrauded of delight, sick, shaken by each heart-beat or paralyzed, stretched at length, who gasps: these ripe pears are bitter to the taste, this spiced wine, poison, corrupt. I cannot walk -- who would walk? Life is a scavanger's pit -- I escape -- I only, rejecting it, lying here on this couch. Your garden sloped to the beach, myrtle overran the paths, honey and amber flecked each leaf, the citron-lily head -- one among many -- weighed there, over-sweet. The myrrh-hyacinth spread across low slopes, violets streaked black ridges through the grass. The house, too, was like this, over painted, over lovely -- the world is like this. Sleepless nights, I remember the initiates, their gesture, their calm glance. I have heard how in rapt thought, in vision, they speak with another race, more beautiful, more intense than this. I could laugh -- more beautiful, more intense? Perhaps that other life is contrast always to this. I reason: I have lived as they in their inmost rites -- they endure the tense nerves through the moment of ritual. I endure from moment to moment -- days pass all alike, tortured, intense. This I forgot last night: you must not be blamed, it is not your fault; as a child, a flower -- any flower tore my breast -- meadow-chickory, a common grass-tip, a leaf shadow, a flower tint unexpected on a winter-branch. I reason: another life holds what this lacks, a sea, unmoving, quiet -- not forcing our strength to rise to it, beat on beat -- a stretch of sand, no garden beyond, strangling with its myrrh-lilies -- a hill, not set with black violets but stones, stones, bare rocks, dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty to distract -- to crowd madness upon madness. Only a still place and perhaps some outer horror some hideousness to stamp beauty, a mark -- no changing it now -- on our hearts. I send no string of pearls, no bracelet -- accept this. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE DESERTED PLANTATION by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR PEARLS OF THE FAITH: 27. AS-SAMI'H by EDWIN ARNOLD ACHIEVEMENT by MORRIS ABEL BEER ON THE GREAT ENCOURAGEMENT GIVEN BY ENGLISH NOBILITY & GENTRY by WILLIAM BLAKE THE ROBBER by JOHN GARDINER CALKINS BRAINARD FLAME LILIES by CHRISTINE F. BRONSON THE CHILD IN THE STORY GOES TO BED by WALTER JOHN DE LA MARE |