Poems and Baudelaire Flowers/Pastoral
PASTORAL
Out in the fields, at times,
When you are too tired to speak
And I cease from stringing you rhymes
And kissing your mouth and cheek,
When the sun beats down so hot
That you lie with half-closed eyes
Drinking in what air’s to be got,
I move from your breast, half rise,
And bend o’er your face awhile,
My arm round your neck beneath,
And gaze past your lazy smile
’Twixt the even white lines of your teeth,
To your inner mouth and your throat
Where, like water-anemones,
Pink mounds and tendrils float
In silky salivan seas.
I scarce can believe it true
That within that delicate gate
Is the whole strange structure of you
So wondrously ornate.
And I marvel that a brain
That can think is thereabove,
That below that tiny drain
Is a crimson heart that can move—
A living brain so near
Behind its carven screen,
A heart I can often hear
And yet have never seen;
That through head and trunk and limbs,
In artery and vein,
The blood sings pulsing hymns
To serve that heart and brain;
That your stomach’s creamy skin,
Soft-downed like a giant peach,
Conceals a coiled fire within
That flames in thought and speech;
Tubes in a cavern of bone
Writhing fold upon fold,
Mine, miner, philosopher’s stone,
Pent forge of infinite gold;
That there rest in your raftered room,
Distilling their secret dews,
Great gems of flesh in the gloom
With a hundred hidden hues.
And I fetch back my eyes, half dazed
At the miracles richly spread
In this temple Time has raised
On countless tribes of the dead,
And draw our bosoms asunder,
And quiver, and backward sink
In a luminous cloud of wonder,
And look at the sky and think
Of this you and this shrine of yours
That I cannot tell from you,
This complicate thing that lures
My being and thrills me through
With hopes and longings and lusts,
Tumults of body and mind,
A medley of pulls and thrusts
Unnumbered and undefined.
A medley they are, but I learn them
On the summits of thought and dream
As parts of a whole, and discern them
One Love though many they seem:
The Love that gloats on the swell
Of your breast all ripe for its fang,
The Love that would suffer a hell
To save you a passing pang,
The Love with throb and sting
At whose waking my loins are stirred,
The Love that would make me fling
From a cliff-top at your word. . . . .
On a sudden I break my thought
With a little laugh, and turn
As a dutiful lover ought
To fanning your cheeks that burn,
And smoothing your tangled hair
From your forehead, strand by strand,
With such a caressing care
That you needs must draw back my hand
And lift your arms to enfold me
And draw me down to your face,
And closer, closer, hold me
In the depths of a dumb embrace,
Till we cling without stir on the grass
Under the quiet sun,
Forgetting that all things pass,
Dead to all things but one.