Classic Poem

Some day I'll have to stop you on the street
Or you will simply pass me when we meet;

But meanwhile I have still just grace enough
To fill a faded room like this with stuff

To bring you back and hold you where the toy
I am in being fondled kindles joy,

As some small pastime might in a mere boy
Whose love of flame no candle can destroy.

Another woman has another way
Of giving man the thing I needn't say;

Most any woman knows the roundelay
For buying what she has to buy and pay

The man who has his lustrous night entire
At so much for the bargain and the fire.

But I'm in a caprice to give you more
Than even I have given you before

To prove or not to prove that I can move
A man who comes for me to come for love,

Or show perhaps, if only for the whim,
That she who offers this might care for him

And come to him no longer in the guise
One tightens round the self until it dies.

My candor tends to spoil your holiday?
And yet it's not for talk I'd have you stay.

Let me pour you a second cup of tea
And improvise a better thought of me.

Although you fancy an accustomed vein,
Shouldn't I be sure to entertain

A visitor like you with variation?
Avoid a bit repeating a relation?

Isn't it thus the arts refine in Asia?
Sagacity resourceful as a geisha?

Not even priests eschew insinuation
Of some quite novel method of libation.

I digress? Where was I? What did I say?
You really don't mind having me this way?

It soothes you? Does it truly? I'd have meant
To play our commonplace an instrument

As subtle as a clavichord or a spinet,
With many spider-grained illusions in it

Reflecting haunted webs of shadowed fire
For slowly rousing delicate desire.

Why shouldn't one wear silk between the skin
And that possession man would enter in?

And mustn't one be careful not to wean
His thought from the fictitious go-between,

The puzzle for the mind to circumvent
Lest ardor, gaining all at once, be spent?

You smile a little, corners of you flicker.
How sensitive you are and so much quicker

To take a point of view that isn't yours,
Leading, however, to the selfsame source.

Consoling after all it is to give
Oneself to one who lets a hope or grief

Indulge in melancholy mockery,
Then break its brittle walls like crockery.

Now rest your head awhile among the pillows
And I'll cease imitating moaning willows.

I merely thought when you came in the door,
When you came in just as you've done before,

That somehow one man might learn to revere
A lover who could save love from the sere,

A man who'd go so far as to adore
The woman who would not degrade a chore;

For isn't she, when love is that, a wife,
Or one who gropes along the street for life?

There's nothing in this mood to bring you sorrow
Or cause you to regret tonight tomorrow.

Let me draw that dark shade across your eyes
And keep them and the sun from growing wise.

The sun at twilight is a yellow ring
And pessimism is a mellow thing.

I'd have instead a candle in the room:
A slender moon-like handle for the gloom

To flutter, widen, soften to a curtain,
To hide what may transpire and still be certain

That what we do is neither you nor I,
And what we don't do isn't all a lie.

It needs but such a sly white artifice
To mark that we have reached an old abyss

In which there's naught of romance to endanger
A careless move or turn each stranger stranger.

The hushed event will yield to you and me
No more than what we were, each body free.

And I am here beside you praying only
That I won't seem too far and you too lonely.

What have I said to make you sigh and stare?
You'd better stretch full-length and unaware

And feel the blood start tingling in your toes
And feel it mount and go to where love goes.

As for myself, I love them thus: my feet
Seem far away: the length of some long street.

And doesn't life itself begin like this?
And death as well come on with such a kiss?

All verticals lie down in front of him
Whenever his head nears and has the whim?

I'm only improvising—see—I laugh—
And what I've said, consider merely chaff.

You want me to be quiet now? Of course.
And silence is at last the best divorce.