Ah, stern cold man,
How can you lie so relentless
hard
While I wash
you with weeping water!
Ah, face, carved hard and cold,
You have been like this, on
your guard
Against
me, since death began.
You masquerader!
How can you shame to act this
part
Of unswerving
indifference to me?
It is not you; why disguise yourself
Against me, to break my heart,
You
evader?
You’ve a warm mouth,
A good warm mouth always sooner
to soften
Even than
your sudden eyes.
Ah
cruel, to keep your mouth
Relentless, however often
I kiss it in
drouth.
You are not he.
Who are you, lying in his place
on the bed
And rigid
and indifferent to me?
His mouth, though he laughed or
sulked
Was always
warm and red
And
good to me.
And his eyes could see
The white moon hang like a
breast revealed
By
the slipping shawl of stars,
Could see the small stars tremble
As the heart beneath did
wield
Systole,
diastole.
And he showed it me
So, when he made his love to
me;
And his brows
like rocks on the sea jut out,
And his eyes were deep like the sea
With shadow, and he looked at
me,
Till I sank in
him like the sea,
Awfully.
Oh, he was multiform —
Which then was he among the manifold?
The gay, the sorrowful, the seer?
I have loved a rich race of men
in one —
— But not this, this never-warm
Metal-cold —
!
Ah, masquerader!
With your steel face
white-enamelled
Were
you he, after all, and I never
Saw you or felt you in kissing?
— Yet
sometimes my heart was trammelled
With fear, evader!
You will not stir,
Nor hear me, not a
sound.
— Then it was you —
And all this time you were
Like this when I lived with you.
It is not true,
I am frightened, I am
frightened of you
And of everything.
O
God! — God too
Has
deceived me in everything,
In everything.