Precipitations | Page 8

the cavern.
You may come in the shell to overpower her,
Males,
But in the
shell, in the shell.
She cannot be torn from the shell without dying;

And what is the pleasure of intercourse with the dead?
AT THE MEETING HOUSE
Souls as dry as autumn leaves,
The color long since out.
The organ plays.
The leaves crackle and rustle a little;
Then sink

down.
Old ladies with gray moss on their chins,
Old men with camphor and
cotton packed around their heads,
Thin child spirits, sharp and shrill
as whistles.
Gray old trees;
Gaunt old woods;
Souls as dry as leaves
After
autumn is past.
CHRISTIANS
Blind, they storm up from the pit.
You gave them the force,
You,
when You poured the measure of agony into them.
Didn't You know
what it would be,
Giving blind people fire?
Not gold and red and
amber fire,
But marsh fire.
Fire of ice,
Suffering forged into
suffering!
They are coming up now.
The sword is uplifted in the hands of the
monster.
My valiant little puppets,
Did you think you could stand out against
this?
Pierrot and Columbine breeding in the flowers....
There must be no flowers.
DEVIL'S CRADLE
Black man hanged on a silver tree;
(Down by the river,
Slow river,

White breast,
White face with blood on it.)
Black man creaks in
the wind,
Knees slack.
Brown poppies, melting in moonlight,

Swerve on glistening stems
Across an endless field
To the music of
a blood white face
And a tired little devil child
Rocked to sleep on a
rope.
WOMEN

Crystal columns,
When they bend they crack;
Brittle souls,

Conforming, yet not conforming--
Mirrors.
Masculine souls pass across the mirrors:
Whirling, gliding ecstasies--

Retreating, retreating,
Dimly, dimly,
Like dreams fading across
the mirrors.
Then the mirrors,
Stark and brilliant in the sunshine,
Blank as the
desert,
Blank as the Sphinx,
Winking golden eyes in the twinkles of
light,
Silent, immutable, vacuous infinity,
Illimitable capacity for
absorption,
Absorbing nothing.
Have the shapes and the shadows been swallowed up
In your recesses
without depth,
You drinkers of life,
Twinkling maliciously
Your
golden yellow eyes,
Mirrors winking in the sunshine?
PENELOPE
Gray old spinners,
Weaving with the crafty fibers of your souls;

Nothing was given you but those impalpable threads.
Yet you have bound the race,
Stranglers,
With your silver spun
mysteries.
All the cruel,
All the mad,
The foolish,
And the
beautiful, too:
It all belongs to you
Since the first time
That you
began to drop the filmy threads
When the world was half asleep.
Sometimes you are young girls;
Sometimes there are roses in your
hair.
But I know you--
Sitting back there in the hollow shadows of
your wombs.
The crafty fibers of your souls
Are woven in and out

With the fibers of life.
POOR PEOPLE'S DREAMS
Sometimes women with eyes like wet green berries
Glide across the
slick mirror of their own smiles
And vanish through lengths of gold

and marble drawing rooms. The marble smiles,
As sensuous as snow;

Hips of the Graces;
Shoulders of Clytie;
Breasts frozen as foam,
Frozen as camelia
bloom;
Mounds of marble flesh,
Inexplicable wonder of white....
I dream about statuesque beauties
Who look from the shadows of
opera boxes;
Or elegant ladies in novels of eighteen thirty,
At the
hunt ball...
Reflections in a polish floor,
A portrait by Renoir,
A
Degas dancing girl,
English country houses,
An autumn afternoon
in the Bois,
Something I have read of...
In sleep one vision
retreating through another,
Like mirrors being doors to other mirrors,

Satin, and lace, and white shoulders,
And elegant ladies,
Dancing,
dancing.
FOR WIVES AND MISTRESSES
Death,
Being a woman,
Being passive like all final things,
Being
a mother,
Waits.
Shining faces
Gray and melt into her flesh.
Death envies those
asleep in her,
Little children who have come back,
Fiery faces,

Bright for a moment in the darkness,
Extinguished softly in her
womb.
PORTRAITS
PORTRAIT OF RICH OLD LADY
Old lady talks,
Spins from her lips
Warp and woof
Of teapots,
tables, napery,
Sanitary toilets,
Old bedsteads, pictures on walls,

And fine lace,
Spins a cocoon of this secondary life.
Warm and snug is old lady's belly.
Old lady makes Venus Aphrodite


Parvenue.
Old lady
Arranges places for courtesans
In warm
outbuildings on back streets.

NIGGER
Nigger with flat cheeks and swollen purple lips;
Nigger with loose
red tongue;
Flat browed nigger,
Your skull peaked at the zenith,

The stretched glistening skin
Covered with tight coiled springs of hair:

I am up here cold.
I am white man.
You are still warm and sweet

With the darkness you were born in.
THE MAIDEN MOTHER
He has a squat body,
Glowering brows,
And bulging eyes.
Lustful
contemplation of the meat pie
Is written all over his sweating face.
The thin woman with the meek voice,
Who has carried him so long in
her body
And despairs of giving him birth,
Watches over him in
secret
With bitter and resentful tenderness.
A PIOUS WOMAN
You can bury your face in her thick soul of cotton batting
And smell
candle wax and church incense.
When she dies she must be burned.

Laid in the ground she would only soak up moisture
And get soggy,

As now she has a way of soaking up tears
Never meant for her.
A VERY OLD ROSE JAR
She ran across the lawn after the cat
And I saw through the old maid,
as through a shadow,
A young girl in a white muslin dress running to
meet her lover. There was clashing of cymbals,
And the flash of
nereids' arms in autumn leaves.
A sharp high note died out like