D'ABSINTHE

_Rue d'Aphrodite_

Her voice was fleet-limbed and immaculate,
And like peach blossoms blown across the wind
Her white words made the hour seem cool and kind,
Hung with soft dawns that danced a shadow fete.
A silken silence crept up from the South,
The flutes were hushed that mimed the orange moon,
And down the willow stream my sighs were strewn,
While I knelt to the corners of her mouth.

Lead me afar from clamorous dissonance,
For I am sick of empty trumpetings,
Choking the highways with a dusty noise.
Here I have found her sweet sheer utterance,
And now I seek the garden of the wings
Where I may bathe in sounds that life destroys.

EXTREME UNCTION

Across the rotting pads in the lily lake
Her gesture floated toward the iris bed,
Wrapped in a whispered perfume of the dead,
And her gaze followed slowly in its wake.
Now was the summons come she must obey,
For Beauty pleaded from the charnel house,
For violet nights and violent carouse
To free her from the cerements of decay.

Crapulous hands reach out to strangle thee,
And every moment is a winding-sheet,
With bats to chant corruption's litany.
Be thou a torch to flash fanfaronade,
And as the earth crumbles beneath thy feet
Flaunt thou the glitter of a new brocade!

THE JADE VASE

_Pittsburgh_

He had hunted for it to the alley's end,
Yet when he found the jade vase he was sad,
Low-pulsed with ennui for the praise he had
Poured into bowls that merely did not offend.
A wall of glass held back his worshipping,
And his eyes that drank this miracle of stone
Acknowledged the discovery not his own--
Still the vase was there, and that was everything.

He thought back over all the songs he had sung,
And all the hours his heart like waving grain
Had swayed to music. And the joys now dead
Seemed haunting coins to meagre beauty flung.
Poignantly he longed to call them back. In vain!
But they were the last words that the poet said.

PORTRAITS OF THE AUTHOR

_To
Cornwall Hollis_

EPICEDE

Wistfully shimmering, shamelessly wise and weak,
He lives in pawn, pledging a battered name;
He loves his failures as one might love fame,
And listens for the ghost years as they speak.
A fragrance bright and broken clasps his head,