Once again, someone falls in their first falling–fall of two bodies, of two eyes, of four green eyes or eight green eyes if we count those born in the mirror (at midnight, in the purest fear, in the loss), you haven’t been able to recognize the voice of your dull silence, to see the earthly messages scrawled in the middle of one mad state, when the body is a glass and from ourselves and from the other we drink some kind of impossible water. Desire needlessly spills on me a cursed liqueur. For my thirsty thirst, what can the promise of eyes do? I speak of something not in this world. I speak of someone whose purpose is elsewhere. And I was naked in memory of the white night. Drunk and I made love all night, just like a sick dog. Sometimes we suffer too much reality in the space of a single night. We get undressed, we’re horrified. We’re aware the mirror sounds like a watch, the mirror from which your cry will pour out, your laceration. Night opens itself only once. It’s enough. You see. You’ve seen. Fear of being two in the mirror, and suddenly we’re four. We cry, we moan, my fear, my joy more horrible than my fear, my visceral words, my words are keys that lock me into a mirror, with you, but ever alone. And I am well aware what night is made of. We’ve fallen so completely into jaws that didn’t expect this sacrifice, this condemnation of my eyes which have seen. I speak of a discovery: felt the I in sex, sex in the I. I speak of burying everyday fear to secure the fear of an instant. The purest loss. But who’ll say: you don’t cry anymore at night? Because madness is also a lie. Like night. Like death.
Anyone who begins a sentence with, “In all honesty ... ” is about to tell a lie. Anyone who says, “This is how I feel” had better love form more than disclosure. Same for anyone who thinks he thinks well because he had a thought.
If you say, “You’re ugly” to an ugly person — no credit for honesty, which must always be a discovery, an act that qualifies as an achievement. If you persist you’re just a cruel bastard, a pig without a mirror,
I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves seated in front of a fireplace, our house made somehow more gracious, and you said “There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I brought down with me
to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature, and it is truth, that we came here, I told you,
In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake’s lily and though an angel he looked absurd dragging a lily out of a beauty-bright store wrapped in tissue with a petal drooping, nor was it useless—you who know it know how useful it is—and how he would be dead in a minute if he were to lose it though how do you lose a lily? His lily was white and he had a foolish smile there holding it up like a candelabrum in his right hand facing the mirror in the hall nor had the endless centuries started yet nor was there one thorn between his small house and the beauty-bright store.
I am thirty this November. You are still small, in your fourth year. We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer, flapping in the winter rain, falling flat and washed. And I remember mostly the three autumns you did not live here. They said I’d never get you back again.
Had I remained in innocent security, I should have thought all men were born my slaves, And worn my power like lightning in my eyes, To have destroyed at pleasure when offended. —But when love held the mirror, the undeceiving glass Reflected all the weakness of my soul, and made me know My richest treasure being lost, my honour, All the remaining spoil could not be worth
I went to the dances at Chandlerville, And played snap-out at Winchester. One time we changed partners, Driving home in the moonlight of middle June, And then I found Davis. We were married and lived together for seventy years, Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children, Eight of whom we lost Ere I had reached the age of sixty. I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, I made the garden, and for holiday Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, And by Spoon River gathering many a shell, And many a flower and medicinal weed — Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
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