...
She speaks no more, but in your hair
Her fingers soft as lullabies
Fold up your senses unaware,
Into a poppy paradise.
And when you wake, the evening mist
Is rising up to float the hill,
And you will say, "The mouth I kissed,
The voice I heard...a dream...but still
"The grass is matted where she lay,
I feel her fingers in my hair"...
But your lamp is bright across the way,
And your mother knits in the rocking chair.
Paris, 1919
IX
The trees have never seemed so green
Since I remember,
As in these groves and gardens of September,
And yet already comes the chill
That bodes the world's last garden ill,
And in the shadow I have seen
A spectre,--even thine,
O Vandal, O November.
The wind leaps up with sudden screams
In gusts of chaff.
Two boys with blowing hair listen and laugh.
We hear the same wind, they and I,
Under the dark autumnal sky;
It blows strange music through their dreams.
Keenly it blows through mine,
Singing their epitaph.
Tours, 1918
X
The green canal is mottled with falling leaves,
Yellow leaves, fluttering silently;
A whirling gust ripples the woods, and heaves
The stricken branches with a sigh,
Then all is still again.
Unmoving, the green waterway receives
Ghosts of the dying forest to its breast;
Loneliness...quiet...not a wing has stirred
In the cold glades; no fish has leaped away
From the heavy waters; not a drop of rain
Distils from the pervading mist.
Sluggishly out of the west
A grey canal-boat glides, half-seen, unheard;
The sweating horses on the towpath sway
Backward and forward in a rhythmic strain;
It passes by, a dream within a dream,
Down the dark corridor of leaning boughs,
Down the long waterways of endless fall.
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