Dear Swinburne, how fell you if Death felled himself?
Did the wind not last, had the running sun stumbled?
What knocks the stone from the clifftop shelf?
What rocks the sea still since the high tide humbled?
If all that remains remains all that that dies
And immortal soul lies forever relieved,
What am I left that your lyric decries
But bereaved?

The same words grow from your garden grave
Where the thorns of the wrought lead roses jingle,
But rocked by the roar of the wild wave
The words disperse and forever mingle.
Time can unravel the thorns and the weeds
And the wind and the sea and the sun and the rain,
Unravel Death and destroy his seeds
And remain.

I pray that your song stands stable and true
Through the covers I turn, on my lips when I sing
As the first day your meter upon the page drew
And your rhyme first ascended on nimble a wing;
If not, let you molder with meadows of roses,
As lovers are buried by solitary men,
Till I, upon every couplet that closes,
Read again.

Kiss upon my lover's nose:
It is for you the blossom grows.
Notice now it fans itself
Beyond the bough and hither flows.

Or else the scents came forth aroused
Not by those lips but by their boughs
Who shook and left them to the lake
With whose waters we are daily doused.

But could we shake the scent from trees
And drink the petals' milk as bees,
We might not lead our lips astray
And plant wet kisses where we please.

Single hair left in my bed
Remind me how the rain is shed;
When in old age, do cloudy tufts
Surrender from the skyey head?

"No, no; the drops like rice are stuck
Upright into the paddies' muck
And being pulled from one hillbrow
Are in another gardenbed tucked."

I disagree; when clouds are blown,
They hold their weight as seeds unsown.
It's when we let them lie with us,
The clouds, the locks of love are grown.

Tender feet, who hither sneak:
It is for you the floorboards creak.
Notice that the swollen wood
Is made to shift, but not made weak.

This summer swelter seals the drawers,
And dampness locks the bedroom door;
It keeps inside the sound of feet
Padding on the humid floor.

No cold fingernails can pry
The wood we warp each time we cry;
We, the doors of different shape,
Can open only once we dry.

Fancy in my lover's eyes:
It is for you the cricket cries;
Notice how he sinks to sleep
Each morning when her eyelids rise.

Or else the sun chars off his legs
And sends him drowning to the dregs
Of consciousness, whose cup is deep
And fits him with ethereal pegs:

Alas, they let the cricket fly
But cease to sing our lullaby,
Or drenched with dreaming, resonate
Not while we sleep but when we try.

Eyelash on my lover's cheek:
It is for you the sparrows speak.
Notice when I brush you off
It bends their beaks from bold to meek.

Or else the summer nimbus swells
And rains and quiets—and quells
Their chirping hunger with the humid
Breeze we, in our slumber, smell.

What shy, tired words all softly utter
To the weeping of the gutter!
Hunger buried, moved to thirst,
Our eyes, our hearts, the sparrows flutter.

At the soot-shoed ridge where a foot falls south
Rise the brows of a hill,
Flows a fluid mouth,
Which foams as its lips kiss a stalwart crag,
Whose legs now still
And will ever drag
Up the slow glacis where a hillbrow breaks,
Whence the soft soil spills
And a tree bough rakes
At the cold dense clouds and the heavy haze,
Whose brisk bath fills
The barren white days
From the quaking cliffs to the balmy bays.