n beneath
that startles me, alarms me, stirs up a repulsion?

They are the issue of acrid winter, these first-
flower young women;
their scent is lacerating and repellant,
it smells of burning snow, of hot-ache,
of earth, winter-pressed, strangled in corruption;
it is the scent of the fiery-cold dregs of corruption,
when destruction soaks through the mortified,
decomposing earth,
and the last fires of dissolution burn in the bosom
of the ground.

They are the flowers of ice-vivid mortification,
thaw-cold, ice-corrupt blossoms,
with a loveliness I loathe;
for what kind of ice-rotten, hot-aching heart
must they need to root in!

_CRAVING FOR SPRING_

I WISH it were spring in the world.

Let it be spring!
Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap!
Come, rush of creation!
Come, life! surge through this mass of mortifica-
tion!
Come, sweep away these exquisite, ghastly first-
flowers,
which are rather last-flowers!
Come, thaw down their cool portentousness,
dissolve them:
snowdrops, straight, death-veined exhalations of
white and purple crocuses,
flowers of the penumbra, issue of corruption,
nourished in mortification,
jets of exquisite finality;
Come, spring, make havoc of them!

I trample on the snowdrops, it gives me pleasure
to tread down the jonquils,
to destroy the chill Lent lilies;
for I am sick of them, their faint-bloodedness,
slow-blooded, icy-fleshed, portentous.

I want the fine, kindling wine-sap of spring,
gold, and of inconceivably fine, quintessential
brightness,
rare almost as beams, yet overwhelmingly potent,
strong like the greatest force of world-balancing.

This is the same that picks up the harvest of wheat
and rocks it, tons of grain, on the ripening wind;
the same that dangles the globe-shaped pleiads of
fruit
temptingly in mid-air, between a playful thumb and
finger;
oh, and suddenly, from out of nowhere, whirls
the pear-bloom,
upon us, and apple- and almond- and apricot-
and quince-blossom,
storms and cumulus clouds of all imaginable
blossom
about our bewildered faces,
though we do not worship.

I wish it were spring
cunningly blowing on the fallen sparks, odds and
ends of the old, scattered fire,
and kindling shapely little conflagrations
curious long-legged foals, and wide-eared calves,
and naked sparrow-bubs.

I wish that spring
would start the thundering traffic of feet
new feet on the earth, beating w