I love the sex-passion which is in this witching Body of me. I love to feel its portent grow and creep over me, like a climbing vine of tiny red roses, in the occasional dusks. It is no shame or shadow or sordidness: but beauty and sweetness and light. no token of sin: a token of virtue. no thing to crush: rather to nurture, to garner. no thing to forget: to remember, to think about. no flat weak drawn-out prose: live potent clipped heated poetry. not common and loosely human: rare and divine. not fat daily soup: stinging wine of life. not valueless because born of nothing and nowhere: valuable, priceless, a treasure under lock and key. Sex-desire comes wandering in dusk-time and gulfs me as in a swift violent sweet-smelling whirlwind. It goes away sudden-variant as it came, out of a region of hot quick shadows. And for that, for hours and days afterward, oranges and apples look brighter-colored to my eyes: hammocks swing easier as I sit in them: rugs feel softer to my feet: the black dresses lend themselves gentler to my form: pencils slide faciler on paper: my voice speaks less difficultly into telephones: meanings sound super-vibrant in Keats’s Odes: sugar--little pinches of granulated sugar--are shaper, sweeter-sweeter in my throat. And God grows less remote. And my wooden coffin and deep wet yellow clay grave move a long way back from me. --all from fleeting ungratified wish of sly sex-tissues-- Also in it, and in my life from it, I sense some deathly pathos. _The necklace_ To-morrow The Necklace which God long ago hung round the white neck of my Soul is composed of little-seeming curses, like precious and semi-precious gems. They are polished smooth as if by age, as if by wear, as if by fingering and as if by brisk industrious rubbing. The Necklace is at once beautiful and ugly. The gems are in color chiefly blues and greens--with grays, lavenders, drabs and mauves. But mostly blues and greens. They make a circlet of small stones strung at short intervals as if on a strong thin gold wire, with two large tawdry pretty pendants hung in front. One of the pendants is my fertile phase of Weakness and the other my odd encompassing Folly. The smaller stones are seventeen in number and their names and natures are these: the first is Dishonesty which makes ghosts of half my life. the second is Pretense, hard and genuine stone, which keeps me from being all-ways sincere even to anyone who knows me and whom I know: who loves me and whom I love. the third is Fear which makes me who scorn all leonine dangers cringe and crawl for Trifles of life incredibly little. the fourth is Sensuality which burns and bursts across my Mind, half-missing my Body. the fifth is Anxiety, strange flawed green stone--by it I worry, tortured and wildly wavering, about the passing hours of my life: where they are going, where they are taking me.