NEIGHBORS Ah, you are cruel; You ask too much; Offered a hand, a finger-tip, You must have a soul to clutch. I HAVE A FRIEND I have a friend And my heart from hence Is closed to friendship, Nor the gods’ knees hold but one; He watches with me thru the long night, And when I call he comes, Or when he calls I am there; He does not ask me how beloved Are my husband and children, Nor ever do I require Details of life and love In the grave--his home,-- We are such friends. SUBSTITUTION Is Life itself but many ways of thought, Does _thinking_ furl the poets’ pleiades, Is in His slightest convolution wrought These mantled worlds and their men-freighted seas? He thinks--and being comes to ardent things: The splendor of the day-spent sun, love’s birth,-- Or dreams a little, while creation swings The circle of His mind and Time’s full girth ... As here within this noisy peopled room My thought leans forward ... quick! you’re lifted clear Of brick and frame to moonlit garden bloom,-- Absurdly easy, now, our walking, dear, Talking, my leaning close to touch your face ... His All-Mind bids us keep this sacred place! QUESTING Let me learn now where Beauty is; My day is spent too far toward night To wander aimlessly and miss her place; To grope, eyes shut, and fingers touching space. Her maidens I have known, seen durance beside, Handmaidens to the Queen, whose duty bids Them lie and lure afield their Vestal’s acolyte, Lest a human shake the throne, lest a god should know his might: Nereid, daughter of the Trident, steering in her shell, Paused in voyage, smile beguiling, tempted and I fell; Spiteful dryads, sport forsaking, tossing birchen wreathes, Left the Druidic priests they teased so In the oaken trees, crying, “Ho a mortal! here a believer!” Bound me, she who held the sceptre, stricken by her, ah, deceiver ... But let me learn now where Beauty is; I was born to know her mysteries, And needing wisdom I must go in vain: Being sworn bring to some hither land, Leaf from her brow, light from her torchéd hand. LIFE-LONG, POOR BROWNING ... Life-long, poor Browning never knew Virginia, Or he’d not grieved in Florence for April sallies Back to English gardens after Euclid’s linear: Clipt yews, Pomander Walks, and pleachéd alleys; Primroses, prim indeed, in quite ordered hedges, Waterways, soberly, sedately enchanneled, No thin riotous blade even among the sedges, All the wild country-side tamely impaneled ... Dead, now, dear Browning, lives on in heaven,-- (Heaven’s Virginia when the year’s at its Spring) He’s haunting the byways of wine-aired leaven And throating the notes of the wildings on wing; Here canopied reaches of dogwood and hazel, Beech tree and redbud fine-laced in vines, Fleet clapping rills by lush fern and basil, Drain blue hills to lowlands scented with pines ... Think you he meets in this tender green sweetness Shade that was Elizabeth ... immortal completeness! DUNBAR