Sleep, dwell for long between her fair, curved eyelids, and continue the happy night with a dream of good augury. LXV THE KISS I will kiss, from one end to the other, the long dark wings spreading from thy neck, O sweet bird, captive dove, whose heart bounds beneath my hand. I will take thy lips within my lips as an infant takes the breast of its mother. Shudder!... for the kiss penetrates profoundly and is sufficient to thy love. I will move my tongue lightly along thine arms, and upon thy neck; and I will wind along thy sensitive sides the lengthening caress of my nails. Hear, roaring in thine ears, all the rumor of the sea.... Mnasidika! thy look makes me suffer. Like thy lips, I would close thy burning eyelids with my kiss. LXVI JEALOUS CARE Do not arrange thy hair, for fear lest the over-heated iron burn thy neck or thy locks. Leave it upon thy shoulders and spread over thine arms. Do not dress thyself, for fear lest the girdle redden the slender folds of thy hips. Remain naked like a little girl. Do not even rise, for fear lest thy fragile feet be injured in walking. Repose in the bed, O victim of Eros, and I will dress thy poor wound. For I would not see upon thy body other marks, Mnasidika, than the blemish of an over-long kiss, the scratch of a sharp nail, or the reddening bar of my embrace. LXVII THE DESPAIRING EMBRACE Love me, not with smiles, flutes, or plaited flowers, but with thy heart and thy tears, as I love thee with my breast and my lamentations. When thy breasts alternate with my breasts, when I feel thy life touching my life, when thy knees stand up behind me, then my panting mouth knows not how more to unite with thine. Clasp me as I clasp thee! See, the lamp has died out, we turn and twist in the night; but I press thy moving body and I hear thy perpetual plaint.... Moan! moan! moan! O woman! Eros leads us in sorrow. Thou wilt suffer less on the bed in bringing a child into the world than when giving birth to thy love. LXVIII THE HEART Breathless, I take her hand and apply it forcibly to the moist skin of my left breast. And I turn my head here and there and I move my lips without speaking. My excited heart, abrupt and hard, beats and beats in my breast as an imprisoned satyr would knock, imprisoned in a leathern bottle. She says to me: “Thy heart makes thee ill....” “O Mnasidika,” I respond, “the heart of a woman is not there. That is only a poor bird, a dove which stirs its feeble wings. The heart of a woman is more terrible. “Like a little myrtle berry, it burns with a red flame and under an abundant foam. It is there that I feel myself bitten by voracious Aphrodite.” LXIX WORDS IN THE NIGHT