ry skilful is your hand.
With a tiny brush it can feather lines of ineffable suggestion,
glints of hidden beauty. With a little
tool it can carve strange dreams in ivory and
milky jade.

And cruel is your hand.
With the same cold daintiness and skill it can devise
exquisite tortures, eternities of incredible pain,
that Torquemada never glimpsed.
And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of touch.
Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly it can
glide over golden thighs.... Bilitis had not
such long nails.

Who can read me your hand?
In the firelight the smoke curls up fantastically from
the cigarette between your fingers which are the
color of new bronze.
The room is full of strange shadows.
I am afraid of your hand....

From
the
Interior

Cormorants

The boats of your masters are black;
They are filthy with the slimy filth of ages; like the
canals on which they float they give forth an evil
smell.
On soiled perches you sit, swung out on either side over
the scummy water--you who should be savage
and untamed, who should ride on the clean breath
of the sea and beat your pinions in the strong
storms of the sea.
Yet you are not held.
Tamely you sit and willingly, ten wretches to a boat,
lurching and half asleep.

Around each throat is a ring of straw, a small ring, so
that you may swallow only small things, such as
your masters desire.
Presently, when you reach the lake, you will dive.
At the word of your masters the parted waters will
close over you and in your ears will be the gurgling
of yellow streams.
Hungrily you will search in the darkened void, swiftly
you will pounce on the silver shadow....
Then you will rise again, bearing in your beak the
struggling prey,
And your lousy lords, whose rings are upon your
throats, will take from you the catch, giving in its
place a puny wriggler which can pass the gates of
straw.
Such is your servitude.

Yet willingly you sit, lurching and half asleep.
The boatmen shout one to another in nasal discords.
Lazily you preen your great wings, eagle wings,
built for the sky;
And you yawn....

Faugh! The sight of you sickens me, divers in inland
filth!
You grow lousy like your lords,
For you have forgotten the sea.

Wusih

A Scholar

You sit, chanting the maxims of Confucius.
On your head is a domed cap of black satin an