I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It’s worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.
Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing.
It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee— With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me— Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Your love and pity doth the impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow; For what care I who calls me well or ill, So you o’er-green my bad, my good allow?
You are my all the world, and I must strive To know my shames and praises from your tongue; None else to me, nor I to none alive, That my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others’ voices, that my adder’s sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are. Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred That all the world besides methinks are dead.
Going to Heaven! I don't know when — Pray do not ask me how! Indeed I'm too astonished To think of answering you! Going to Heaven! How dim it sounds! And yet it will be done As sure as flocks go home at night Unto the Shepherd's arm!
Perhaps you're going too! Who knows? If you should get there first Save just a little space for me Close to the two I lost — The smallest "Robe" will fit me And just a bit of "Crown" — For you know we do not mind our dress When we are going home —
I'm glad I don't believe it For it would stop my breath — And I'd like to look a little more At such a curious Earth! I'm glad they did believe it Whom I have never found Since the might Autumn afternoon I left them in the ground.
Tended by Faustina yes in a crazy house upon a crazy bed, frail, of chipped enamel, blooming above her head into four vaguely roselike flower-formations,
the white woman whispers to herself. The floorboards sag this way and that. The crooked towel-covered table bears a can of talcum and five pasteboard boxes of little pills,
most half-crystallized. The visitor sits and watches the dew glint on the screen and in it two glow-worms burning a drowned green. Meanwhile the eighty-watt bulb betrays us all,
discovering the concern within our stupefaction; lighting as well on heads of tacks in the wallpaper, on a paper wall-pocket, violet-embossed, glistening with mica flakes.
It exposes the fine white hair, the gown with the undershirt showing at the neck, the pallid palm-leaf fan she holds but cannot wield, her white disordered sheets like wilted roses.
Clutter of trophies, chamber of bleached flags! -Rags or ragged garments hung on the chairs and hooks each contributing its shade of white, confusing as undazzling.
The visitor is embarrassed not by pain nor age nor even nakedness, though perhaps by its reverse. By and by the whisper says, "Faustina, Faustina. . ." Vengo, senora!"
On bare scraping feet Faustina nears the bed. She exhibits the talcum powder, the pills, the cans of "cream," the white bowl of farina, requesting for herself a little conac;
complaining of, explaining, the terms of her employment. She bends above the other. Her sinister kind face presents a cruel black coincident conundrum. Oh, is it
freedom at last, a lifelong dream of time and silence, dream of protection and rest? Or is it the very worst, the unimaginable nightmare that never before dared last more than a second?
The acuteness of the question forks instantly and starts a snake-tongue flickering; blurs further, blunts, softens, separates, falls, our problems becoming helplessly proliferative.
There is no way of telling. The eyes say only either. At last the visitor rises, awkwardly proffers her bunch of rust-perforated roses and wonders oh, whence come all the petals.
'Tis said that when The hands of men Tamed this primeval wood, And hoary trees with groans of woe, Like warriors by an unknown foe, Were in their strength subdued, The virgin Earth Gave instant birth To springs that ne'er did flow That in the sun Did rivulets run, And all around rare flowers did blow The wild rose pale Perfumed the gale And the queenly lily adown the dale (Whom the sun and the dew And the winds did woo), With the gourd and the grape luxuriant grew.
So when in tears The love of years Is wasted like the snow, And the fine fibrils of its life By the rude wrong of instant strife Are broken at a blow Within the heart Do springs upstart Of which it doth now know, And strange, sweet dreams, Like silent streams That from new fountains overflow, With the earlier tide Of rivers glide Deep in the heart whose hope has died-- Quenching the fires its ashes hide,-- Its ashes, whence will spring and grow Sweet flowers, ere long, The rare and radiant flowers of song!