Tarry not one moment longer:
See, my fire is smould'ring low;
Take your way across the twilight
Down the road where dead dreams go.

Warm I knelt beside my fireplace
When you chanced upon my door,
But the gust of cold you brought in
Swept the flames I fanned before.

I have no regrets, O cold one:
Dusk has crept within my heart
Since the dying embers told me
And the gloom bade you depart.

Pass from my young life forever,
For I want the crimson glow
Which the chill your shadow brings in
Never, never can bestow.

Tarry not one moment longer:
See, my gate is open yet:
Take your way across the starlight
And forget that we have met.

I shall haunt you, O my lost one, as the twilight
Haunts a grieving bamboo trail,
And your dreams will linger strangely with the music
Of a phantom lover's tale.

You shall not forget, for I am past forgetting.
I shall come to you again
With the starlight, and the scent of wild champakas,
And the melody of rain.

You shall not forget. Dusk will peer into your
Window, tragic-eyed and still,
And unbidden startle you into remembrance
With its hand upon the sill.

It was a sacrilege, the neighbors cried,
They way she shattered every mullioned pane
To let a firebrand in. They tried in vain
To understand how one so carved from pride
And glassed in dream could have so flung aside
Her graven days, or why she dared profane
The bread and wine of life for one insane
Moment with him. The scandal never died.

But no one guessed that loveliness would claim
Her soul's cathedral burned by his desires,
Or that he left her aureoled in flame...
And seeing nothing but her blackened spires,
The town condemned this girl who loved too well
And found her heaven in the depths of hell.

Why should I have to eat the dust
And give the bended knee
Before my lips can touch the hem
Of immortality?

It was not love - why should I love you? -
It was not folly, for I was wise,
Yet when you looked at me, your looking
Opened a kingdom to my eyes.

It was not love, it was not folly,
I have no name to know it by,
I only know one shining instant
You held my earth, you held my sky.

So much for a sigh was given,
So much for a midnight kiss
It were not as if heaven
Would ask a price as this -

An avalanche of Sorrow
For a vein of golden clay,
A broken, dead Tomorrow
For one living Yesterday.

I said, "I must forget you
And throw old love away,"
But sternly as I chided,
My heart would not obey.

For O, it very deftly
Had ravelled all along
My old, discarded love and
Respun it into song.

You are my earth and all that earth implies:
The gravity that ballasts me in space,
The air I breathe, the land that stills my cries
For food and shelter against devouring days.
You are the earth whose orbit marks my way
And sets my north and south, my east and west,
You are the final, elemental clay
The driven heart must turn to for its rest.

If in your arms that hold me now so near
I lift my keening thoughts to another one,
As trees long rooted to earth uprear
Their quickening leaves and flowers to the sun,
You who are earth, O never doubt that I
Need you no less because I need the sky!

I can not love you with a love
That outcompares the boundless sea,
For that were false, as no such love
And no such ocean can ever be.

But I can love you with a love
As finite as the wave that dies
And dying holds from crest to crest
The blue of everlasting skies.

I lost my love for you
Somewhere at dawn.
Have you seen it under the dew
Enchanted into stone?

How my hands were thus bereaven
I can never tell:
I was drunk with so much heaven
When I slipped and fell -
(And to think that once I even
Stoned out Jezebel)

I lost my love for you
Somewhere at dawn:
Have you seen my heart askew,
Brother of stone?

Let the mind be steel and the heart be fallow,
Let the night and the day be one,
Let the dream be no longer a dream and a halo:
Love from this kingdom is gone.

On a hill that the stars in their watch will remember
Till the crash of judgment day,
He lies, who once broke bread with November
And drank of the wine of May.

He sleeps. And though battlefields turn to clover
And bayonets honor the slain,
Though peace be a tune hummed over and over
In moonlight and sunshine and rain,

The mind is steel and the heart is fallow,
Morning and midnight are one,
The dream is no longer a dream and a halo:
Love is gone.