Chapter I: DON'T care whether I am beautiful to you

You other women. Nothing of me that you see is my own; A man balances, bone unto bone Balances, everything thrown In the scale, you other women.

You may look and say to yourselves, I do
Not show like the rest.
My face may not please you, nor my stature; yet
if you knew
How happy I am, how my heart in the wind rings
true
Like a bell that is chiming, each stroke as a stroke
falls due,
You other women:

You would draw your mirror towards you, you
would wish
To be different.
There's the beauty you cannot see, myself and
him
Balanced in glorious equilibrium,
The swinging beauty of equilibrium,
You other women.

There's this other beauty, the way of the stars You straggling women. If you knew how I swerve in peace, in the equi- poise With the man, if you knew how my flesh enjoys The swinging bliss no shattering ever destroys You other women:

You would envy me, you would think me wonder- ful Beyond compare; You would weep to be lapsing on such harmony As carries me, you would wonder aloud that he Who is so strange should correspond with me Everywhere.

You see he is different, he is dangerous, Without pity or love. And yet how his separate being liberates me And gives me peace! You cannot see How the stars are moving in surety Exquisite, high above.

We move without knowing, we sleep, and we travel on, You other women. And this is beauty to me, to be lifted and gone In a motion human inhuman, two and one Encompassed, and many reduced to none, You other women.

KENSINGTON

_PEOPLE_

THE great gold apples of night Hang from the street's long bough Dripping their light On the faces that drift below, On the faces that drift and blow Down the night-time, out of sight In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night Distilling over me Makes sickening the white Ghost-flux of faces that hie Them endlessly, endlessly by Without meaning or reason why They ever should be.

_STREET LAMPS_

GOLD, with an innermost speck Of silver, singing afloat Beneath the night, Like balls of thistle-down Wandering up and down Over the whispering town Seeking where to alight!

Slowly, above the street Above the ebb of feet Drifting in flight; Still, in the purple distance The gold of their strange persistence As they cross and part and meet And pass out of sight!

The seed-ball of the sun Is broken at last, and done Is the orb of day. Now to the separate ends Seed after day-seed wends A separate way.

No sun will ever rise Again on the wonted skies In the midst of the spheres. The globe of the day, over-ripe, Is shattered at last beneath the stripe Of the wind, and its oneness veers Out myriad-wise.

Seed after seed after seed Drifts over the town, in its need To sink and have done; To settle at last in the dark, To bury its weary spark Where the end is begun.

Darkness, and depth of sleep, Nothing to know or to weep Where the seed sinks in To the earth of the under-night Where all is silent, quite Still, and the darknesses steep Out all the sin.

_"SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME"_

SHE said as well to me: "Why are you ashamed? That little bit of your chest that shows between the gap of your shirt, why cover it up? Why shouldn't your legs and your good strong thighs be rough and hairy?--I'm glad they are like that. You are shy, you silly, you silly shy thing. Men are the shyest creatures, they never will come out of their covers. Like any snake slipping into its bed of dead leaves, you hurry into your clothes. And I love you so! Straight and clean and all of a piece is the body of a man, such an instrument, a spade, like a spear, or an oar, such a joy to me--" So she laid her hands and pressed them down my sides, so that I began to wonder over myself, and what I was.

She said to me: "What an instrument, your body! single and perfectly distinct from everything else! What a tool in the hands of the Lord! Only God could have brought it to its shape. It feels as if his handgrasp, wearing you had polished you and hollowed you, hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped you under the breasts and brought you to the very quick of your form, subtler than an old, soft-worn fiddle-bow.

"When I was a child, I loved my father's riding- whip that he used so often. I loved to handle it, it seemed like a near part of him. So I did his pens, and the jasper seal on his desk. Something seemed to surge through me when I touched them.

"So it is with you, but here The joy I feel! God knows what I feel, but it is joy! Look, you are clean and fine and singled out! I admire you so, you are beautiful: this clean sweep of your sides, this firmness, this hard mould! I would die rather than have it injured with one scar. I wish I could grip you like the fist of the Lord, and have you--"

So she said, and I wondered, feeling trammelled and hurt. It did not make me free.

Now I say to her: "No tool, no instrument, no God! Don't touch me and appreciate me. It is an infamy. You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence as it lifts its straight white throat. Your hand would not be so flig and easy. Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder, curled up in the sunshine like a princess; when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder you did not stretch forward to caress her though she looked rarely beautiful and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity. And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face, you are afraid if he rises to his feet, though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a mono- lith, arrested, static.

"Is there nothing in me to make you hesitate? I tell you there is all these. And why should you overlook them in me?--"

_NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH_

I

AND so I cross into another world shyly and in homage linger for an invitation from this unknown that I would trespass on.

I am very glad, and all alone in the world, all alone, and very glad, in a new world where I am disembarked at last.

I could cry with joy, because I am in the new world,
just ventured in.
I could cry with joy, and quite freely, there is
nobody to know.

And whosoever the unknown people of this un-
known world may be
they will never understand my weeping for joy
to be adventuring among them
because it will still be a gesture of the old world I
am making
which they will not understand, because it is
quite, quite foreign to them.

II

I WAS so weary of the world I was so sick of it everything was tainted with myself, skies, trees, flowers, birds, water, people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, nations, armies, war, peace-talking, work, recreation, governing, anarchy, it was all tainted with myself, I knew it all to start with because it was all myself.

When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself plucking my own flowering. When I went in a train, I knew it was myself travelling by my own invention. When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened with my own ears to my own destruction. When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own torn dead body. It was all me, I had done it all in my own flesh.

III