I
1
Moonlight and Autumn: floods of silver,
A waterfall,
Pour over cliffs of space
On crouching hills and camel-backed forests and crowded gardens.
I, too, a moon reflect
The essence of sunlight of old days
And in the silver of memory
Relive youth.
2
The city holds up her chimneys like rain-barrels to catch moonlight,
The ocean drinks silver
To bathe in a pale tinge of green her ships and fishes,
A woman leans from a window
And is a silver shower
On my heart beneath.
3
Wash after dying wash
The sea, low-singing, spans the illimitable shadow of the shore
With silver bridges ...
One pine has moon-soaked needles
That faintly rustle when the night breathes ...
Silence
Throbs in the ear-drums, as if in the highest skies
A music of stars
Were played behind walls of glass, and I could not hear ...
4
A child looks up through the window from his bed
And the face of the moon is the countenance of his first god;
His eyes stained silver
Are round with awe.
Now, years later,
I mercilessly stare through changed vision
At a dead planet.
5
A boy is kissing a girl
In the shadow of a doorway ... the long street
Sounds empty beside them, vacantly grey in the moon ...
Her hair is soft in his hand,
Her lips
Are trembling hotly at his ...
A passion of old cities
Pours a thrill through their hearts,
An old passion of desperate love
Binds them with warm arms ...
The watchman is trying the doors, and stalks by, smiling ...
A ripple of sea-wind, singing a silver moon-song, trips up the street ...
But this passes in fire
From lips to lips, to the beloved woman,
And what was, is,
Old love, a gift to new.
II
1
Night grows vaster
With simulation of intense death ...
At one o'clock
The mountain-farm sleeps
In coop and stable, barn and house;
The forest slumbers
Like an eagle spread-wing on her brood ...
Nests are a rhythm of faint dream,
Gardens are graves ...
2
Like the last soul alive on a dead planet
I sit with my candle,
Unmoved by the majestic march of silence ...
My open window
Is a chute for moon-beams;
Transfigured, the floor receives them ...
3
In intense, vast death
My brain burns,
Burns like the candle:
We are two flames ...
We two are awake and burning into the night ...
My brain burns:
Vivid reaches of battleground, heaped with young bodies ...
Streets of secret windows:
Faces remembered ...
4
Silence marches with invisible ranks from sky to sky,
From coast to coast;
My blood-drops move in their courses
As the planets in theirs ...
The moon like a prow
Plows the ocean of ether ...
And my soul is a moon
Catching the light of my lost sun
And sieving it through silver
For a spread over seas and dunes, over cities and hills,
To behold the perishing living through the immortal dead.
III
1
Who loves the night
When light
Is of other worlds and of other times?
Who shrinks from seeing faces as they are,
And dust,
And glaring streets of noon,
And garbage?
Whose soul sheds on the world
Silvery beams
Of time-transfigured memories,
Blurring the angles with twilight,
Burying the ugly in shadow?
2
The meadow-lark drops
His sunny dew of song
On meadow-grass ...
Robin is in the garden
Wetting his wings among the roses:
A myriad of lives
Take away the lonely nocturne of my heart.
Harvests to gather, apples to crate,
Grapes for the crushing ...
Squirrels and farmer are afoot ...
The woods jet scarlet.
3
Such a fire in the skies is the sun
My moon pales, and whitens, dying ...
The strength of fire
Quenches my stars and shuts through my boundless soul
A narrow sky of day ...
My blood sets toward the task, my spirit is whittled
To a blade of deeds. . . .
The hidden is revealed,
The revealed is hidden.
1
Moonlight and Autumn: floods of silver,
A waterfall,
Pour over cliffs of space
On crouching hills and camel-backed forests and crowded gardens.
I, too, a moon reflect
The essence of sunlight of old days
And in the silver of memory
Relive youth.
2
The city holds up her chimneys like rain-barrels to catch moonlight,
The ocean drinks silver
To bathe in a pale tinge of green her ships and fishes,
A woman leans from a window
And is a silver shower
On my heart beneath.
3
Wash after dying wash
The sea, low-singing, spans the illimitable shadow of the shore
With silver bridges ...
One pine has moon-soaked needles
That faintly rustle when the night breathes ...
Silence
Throbs in the ear-drums, as if in the highest skies
A music of stars
Were played behind walls of glass, and I could not hear ...
4
A child looks up through the window from his bed
And the face of the moon is the countenance of his first god;
His eyes stained silver
Are round with awe.
Now, years later,
I mercilessly stare through changed vision
At a dead planet.
5
A boy is kissing a girl
In the shadow of a doorway ... the long street
Sounds empty beside them, vacantly grey in the moon ...
Her hair is soft in his hand,
Her lips
Are trembling hotly at his ...
A passion of old cities
Pours a thrill through their hearts,
An old passion of desperate love
Binds them with warm arms ...
The watchman is trying the doors, and stalks by, smiling ...
A ripple of sea-wind, singing a silver moon-song, trips up the street ...
But this passes in fire
From lips to lips, to the beloved woman,
And what was, is,
Old love, a gift to new.
II
1
Night grows vaster
With simulation of intense death ...
At one o'clock
The mountain-farm sleeps
In coop and stable, barn and house;
The forest slumbers
Like an eagle spread-wing on her brood ...
Nests are a rhythm of faint dream,
Gardens are graves ...
2
Like the last soul alive on a dead planet
I sit with my candle,
Unmoved by the majestic march of silence ...
My open window
Is a chute for moon-beams;
Transfigured, the floor receives them ...
3
In intense, vast death
My brain burns,
Burns like the candle:
We are two flames ...
We two are awake and burning into the night ...
My brain burns:
Vivid reaches of battleground, heaped with young bodies ...
Streets of secret windows:
Faces remembered ...
4
Silence marches with invisible ranks from sky to sky,
From coast to coast;
My blood-drops move in their courses
As the planets in theirs ...
The moon like a prow
Plows the ocean of ether ...
And my soul is a moon
Catching the light of my lost sun
And sieving it through silver
For a spread over seas and dunes, over cities and hills,
To behold the perishing living through the immortal dead.
III
1
Who loves the night
When light
Is of other worlds and of other times?
Who shrinks from seeing faces as they are,
And dust,
And glaring streets of noon,
And garbage?
Whose soul sheds on the world
Silvery beams
Of time-transfigured memories,
Blurring the angles with twilight,
Burying the ugly in shadow?
2
The meadow-lark drops
His sunny dew of song
On meadow-grass ...
Robin is in the garden
Wetting his wings among the roses:
A myriad of lives
Take away the lonely nocturne of my heart.
Harvests to gather, apples to crate,
Grapes for the crushing ...
Squirrels and farmer are afoot ...
The woods jet scarlet.
3
Such a fire in the skies is the sun
My moon pales, and whitens, dying ...
The strength of fire
Quenches my stars and shuts through my boundless soul
A narrow sky of day ...
My blood sets toward the task, my spirit is whittled
To a blade of deeds. . . .
The hidden is revealed,
The revealed is hidden.
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