This Side of Paradise

*****

A POEM THAT ELEANOR SENT AMORY SEVERAL YEARS LATER

"Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,

Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,

Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter...

Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.

Walking alone... was it splendor, or what, we were bound with,

Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?

Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with

Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

That was the day... and the night for another story,

Pale as a dream and shadowed with pencilled trees--

Ghosts of the stars came by who had sought for glory,

Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive breeze,

Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered,

Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon;

That was the urge that we knew and the language that mattered

That was the debt that we paid to the usurer June.

Here, deepest of dreams, by the waters that bring not

Anything back of the past that we need not know,

What if the light is but sun and the little streams sing not,

We are together, it seems... I have loved you so...

What did the last night hold, with the summer over,

Drawing us back to the home in the changing glade?

What leered out of the dark in the ghostly clover?

God!... till you stirred in your sleep... and were wild afraid...

Well... we have passed... we are chronicle now to the eerie.

Curious metal from meteors that failed in the sky;

Earth-born the tireless is stretched by the water, quite weary,

Close to this ununderstandable changeling that's I...

Fear is an echo we traced to Security's daughter;

Now we are faces and voices... and less, too soon,

Whispering half-love over the lilt of the water...

Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon."

*****

A POEM AMORY SENT TO ELEANOR AND WHICH HE CALLED "SUMMER STORM"

"Faint winds, and a song fading and leaves falling,

Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...

And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...

Our gray blown cloud scurries and lifts above,

Slides on the sun and flutters there to waft her

Sisters on. The shadow of a dove

Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;

And down the valley through the crying trees

The body of the darker storm flies; brings

With its new air the breath of sunken seas

And slender tenuous thunder...

But I wait... Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain--

Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate,

Happier winds that pile her hair;

Again They tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air

Upon me, winds that I know, and storm.