Classic Poem

Always, from my first boyhood,
I have known how, lying awake in a straightened
Nakedness — curtains of rain drawn at the window —
To summon from dimness beautiful bodies,
While, over my iron pallet, the painful
Windiness of lilacs spread an
Impalpable coverlet.

Bodies of young men centaured on horses:
Pliant and tawny as leopards, they ride
Over a ground made spongy by April and rains,
Against the drawn lines of a forest
Misty as rain, clouded with torn green;
Their thighs are pressed like bronze to the gleaming
White flanks of the horses; stirrupless, their feet
Toe in abandon; for their eyes are upraised
Where, blue and afar, the jutted mountains
Renew their ancient march in sunrise.

Scarcely has the brittle bickering of twigs
Subsided from their hoofbeats, when I have, with words,
Disenchanted from the grey web of the wood's edge
The tenuous, rose-frosted beauty of women.
Their mouths are claret-wet from some mystery,
Virginal, awful, performed in the forest;
Or else they have seen, by the yellow flame of crocuses,
The flushed and long-sought touching of lovers.
For now, with burnt savage hair outshaken,
Tremulous, exulted, they front the east wind,
Complaining toward the curveting fading horsemen.

Always it is the same: the fixed, blue-radiant
Mountains; the horsemen on horses, the young men
Staring afar off, and the women crying, crying —
The retreating lure and the sinuous beautiful bodies.

So, beginning at midnight, I am as one
Steeped in intolerable wine, and lie
Throbbing; exhausted only when the arid dawn
Cracks its light on the fissile planes of the mirror.