In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and the daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters,
and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from
embrace
By each button, hook and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?
AMY LOWELL
A BATHER
THICK dappled by circles of sunshine and
fluttering shade.
Your bright, naked body advances, blown over by
leaves,
Half-quenched in their various green, just a point
Of you showing,
A knee or a thigh, sudden glimpsed, then at once
Blotted into
The filmy and flickering forest, to start out again
Triumphant in smooth, supple roundness, edged
Sharp as white ivory,
Cool, perfect, with rose rarely tinting your lips and
Your breasts,
Swelling out from the green in the opulent curves
Of ripe fruit,
And hidden, like fruit, by the swift intermittence
Of leaves.
So, clinging to branches and moss, you advance on the ledges
Of rock which hang over the stream, with the
wood-smells about you,
The pungence of strawberry plants and of gum-
oozing spruces,
While below runs the water impatient, impatient-
to take you,
To splash you, to run down your sides, to sing you
of deepness,
Of pools brown and golden, with brown-and-gold
flags on their borders,
Of blue, lingering skies floating solemnly over your
beauty,
Of undulant waters a-sway in the effort to hold you
To keep you submerged and quiescent while over
you glories
The summer.
Pages:
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70