Light your cigarette, then, in this shadow, | |
And talk to her, your arm engaged with hers. | |
Heavily over your heads the eaten maple | |
In the dead air of August strains and stirs. | |
|
Her stone-white face, in the lamp-light, turns toward you; | 5 |
Darkly, with time-dark eyes, she questions you | |
Whether this universe is what she thinks it— | |
Simple and passionate and profound and true— | |
|
Or whether, as with a sound of dim disaster, | |
A plaintive music brought to a huddled fall, | 10 |
Some ancient treachery slides through the heart of things— | |
The last star falling, seen from the utmost wall … | |
|
And you—what sinister, far, reserves of laughter, | |
What understandings, remote, perplexed, remain | |
Unguessed forever by her who is your victim— | 15 |
Victim, of whom you too are victim again? | |
|
… Come! let us dance once more on the ancient asphalt: | |
Seeing, beneath its strange and recent shape, | |
The eternal horror of rock, from which, for ever, | |
We toss our tortured hands, to no escape. |