Beat in your hand, it’s children growing up,
It’s being cut to death with bits of light,
It’s wanting silver bullets in your heart,
It’s not so happy, but it’s pretty sweet,
I’ve got to go.” She passed her narrow hands
Over her body once, half-wonderingly.
“Divide this transitory and temporal flesh
Into twelve ears of red and yellow corn
And plant each ear beside a different stream.
Yet, in the summer, when the harvesters
Come with their carts, the grain shall change again
And turn into a woman’s body again
And walk across a heap of sickle-blades
To find the naked body of its love.”
She slipped her dress back on and stole downstairs.
The bare feet, whispering, made little sound.
A sleeper breathed, a child turned in its sleep.
She heard the tiny breathings. She shut the door.
The moon rode a high heaven streaked with cloud.
She watched it for a moment. Then she drank
That moon from its high heaven with her mouth
And felt the immaculate burning of that frost
Run from her fingers in such corporal silver
Her whole slight body was a corposant
Of hollow light and the cold sap of the moon.
She knew the dark grass cool beneath her feet.
She knew the opening of the stable door.
It shut behind her. She was in darkness now.
Jack Ellyat, lying in a warm nest of hay,
Stared at the sweet-smelling darkness with troubled eyes.
He was going tomorrow. He couldn’t skulk any more.
—Oh, reasonless thirst in the night, what can slake your thirst,
Reasonless heart, why will you not let me rest?
I have seen a woman wrapped in the grace of leaves,
I have kissed her mouth with my mouth, but I must go—
He was going back to find a piece of himself
That he had lost in a tent, in a red loud noise,
Under a sack of tobacco. Until he found it
He could never be whole again —but the hunger creeps
Like a vine about me, crushing my narrow wisdom,
Crushing my thoughts— He couldn’t stay with Melora.
He couldn’t take her back home. If he were Bailey
He would know what to do. He would follow the weaver’s tune.
He would keep Melora a night from the foggy dew
And then go off with the sunrise to tell the tale
Sometime for a campfire yarn. But he wasn’t Bailey.
He saw himself dead without ever having Melora
And he didn’t like it. Maybe, after the war.
Maybe he could come back to the hider’s place,
Maybe—it is a long time till after the war
And this is now—you took a girl when you found her—
A girl with flags on her garters or a new girl—
It didn’t matter—it made a good campfire yarn—
It was men and women—Bailey—the weaver’s tune—
He heard something move and rustle in the close darkness.
“What’s that?” he said. He got no answering voice
But he knew what it was. He saw a light-footed shadow
Come toward the nest where he lay. For a moment then
He felt weak, half-sickened almost. Then his heart began
To pound to a marching rhythm that was not harsh
Nor sweet, but enormous cadence. “Melora,” he said.
His hand went out and touched the cup of her breast.
What things shall be said of you,
Terrible beauty in armor?
What things shall be said of you,
Horses riding the sky?
The fleetness, the molten speed,
The rhythm rising like beaten
Drums of barbaric gold
Until fire mixes with fire?
The night is a sparkling pit
Where Time no longer has power
But only vast cadence surging
Toward an instant of tiny death.
Then, with the slow withdrawal
Of seas from a rock of moonlight,
The clasping bodies unlock
And the lovers have little words.
What is this spear, this burnished
Arrow in the deep waters
That is not quenched by them
Until it has found its mark?
What is this beating of wings
In the formless heart of the tempest?
This wakening of a sun
That was not wakened before?
They have dragged you down from the sky
And broken you with an ocean
Because you carried the day,
Phaëton, charioteer.
But still you loose from the cloud
The matched desires of your horses
And sow on the ripened earth
The quickened, the piercing flame.
What things shall be said of you,
Terrible beauty in armor?
Dance that is not a dance,
Brief instant of welded swords.
For a moment we strike the black
Door with a fist of brightness.
And then it is over and spent,
And we sink back into life.
Back to the known, the sure,
The river of sleep and waking,
The dreams floating the river,
The nearness, the conquered peace.
You have come and smitten and passed,
Poniard, poniard of sharpness.
The child sleeps in the planet.
The blood sleeps again.
He wasn’t going away when he went to the wood.
He told himself that. They had broken the dime together.
They had cut the heart on the tree. The jack-knife cut
Two pinched half-circles of white on the green bark.
The tree-gum bled from the cuts in sticky, clear drops,
And there you were. And shortly the bark would dry
Dead on the living wood and leave the white heart
All through the winter, all through the rain and snow,
A phantom-blaze to guide a tall phantom-hunter
Who came in lightness along a leaf-buried path.
All through the snowing winter it would be white.
It would take many springs to cover that white again.
What have I done in idleness, in sweet idleness,
What have I done to the forest? I have marked
A tree to be my own with a jack-knife blade
In idleness, in sweet idleness. I have loosed
A dryad out of the tree to chain me with wild
Grapevines and forest trailers forever and ever
To the hider’s place, to the outcast house of the lost,
And now, when I would be free, I am free no more.
He thought of practical matters. There ought to be
A preacher and a gold ring and a wedding-dress,
Only how could there be? He rolled hard words
Over his tongue. “A shotgun wedding,” he said.
It wasn’t like that, it never could be like that,
But there was a deadly likeness. He saw the bored
Shamfaced seducer in the clean Sunday collar,
The whining, pregnant slut in the cheesecloth veil.
They weren’t like
