All things are memory now with you, For poverty girds Your hopes, and only your dreams remain. And sometimes here and there I see as you turn your head a whitened hair, Even when you are smiling most. And a light comes in your eyes like a passing ghost, And a color runs through your cheeks as fresh As burns in a girl's flesh. Then I can shut my eyes and feel the pain That has become a part of you, though I feign Laughter myself. One sees another's bruise And shakes his thought out of it shuddering. So I turn and clamp my will lest I bring Your sorrow into my flesh, who cannot choose But hear your words and laughter, And watch your hands and eyes. Then as I think you over after I have gone from you, and your face Comes to me with its grace Of memory of unfound love: You seem to me the image of all women Who dream and keep under smiles the grief thereof, Or sew, or sit by windows, or read books To hide their Secret's looks. And after a time go out of life and leave No uttered words but in their silence grieve For Life and for the things no tongue can tell: Why Life hurts so, and why Love haunts and hurts Poor men and women in this demi-hell. Perhaps your pathos means that it is well Death in his time the aspiring torch inverts, And all tired flesh and haunted eyes and hands Moving in painéd whiteness are put under The soothing earth to brighten April's wonder. IN THE CAGE The sounds of mid-night trickle into the roar Of morning over the water growing blue. At ten o'clock the August sunbeams pour A blinding flood on Michigan Avenue. But yet the half-drawn shades of bottle green Leave the recesses of the room With misty auras drawn around their gloom Where things lie undistinguished, scarcely seen. You, standing between the window and the bed Are edged with rainbow colors. And I lie Drowsy with quizzical half-open eye Musing upon the contour of your head, Watching you comb your hair, Clothed in a corset waist and skirt of silk, Tied with white braid above your slender hips Which reaches to your knees and makes your bare And delicate legs by contrast white as milk. And as you toss your head to comb its tresses They flash upon me like long strips of sand Between a moonlit sea, pale as your hand, And a red sun that on a high dune stresses Its sanguine heat. And then at times your lips, Protruding half unconscious half in scorn Engage my eyes while looking through the morn At the clear oval of your brow brought full Over the sovereign largeness of your eyes; Or at your breasts that shake not as you pull The comb through stubborn tangles, only rise Scarcely perceptible with breath or signs, Firm unmaternal like a young Bacchante's, Or at your nose profoundly dipped like Dante's Over your chin that softly melts away.