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Colors of Life and Songs and Sonnets
Max Eastman
(1918)
Edited for the Web by Steve Spanoudis
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- OUR motion on the soft still misty river
- Is like rest; and like the hours of doom
- That rise and follow one another ever,
- Ghosts of sleeping battle-cruisers loom
- And languish quickly in the liquid gloom.
- From watching them your eyes in tears are gleaming,
- And your heart is still; and like a sound
- In silence is your stillness in the streaming
- Of light-whispered laughter all around,
- Where happy passengers are homeward bound.
- Their sunny journey is in safety ending,
- But for you no journey has an end.
- The tears that to your eyes their light are lending
- Shine in softness to no waiting friend;
- Beyond the search of any eye they tend.
- There is no nest for the unresting fever
- Of your passion, yearning, hungry-veined;
- There is no rest nor blessedness forever
- That can clasp you, quivering and pained,
- Whose eyes burn ever to the Unattained.
- Like time, and like the river's fateful flowing,
- Flowing though the ship has come to rest,
- Your love is passing through the mist and going,
- Going infinitely from your breast,
- Surpassing time on its immortal quest.
- The ship draws softly to the place of waiting,
- All flush forward with a joyful aim,
- And while their hands with happy hands are mating,
- Lips are laughing out a happy name--
- You pause, and pass among them like a flame.
- Max Eastman
- LOOSE-VEIINED and languid as the yellow mist
- That swoons along the river in the sun,
- Your flesh of passion pale and amber-kissed
- With years of heat that through your veins have run,
- You lie with aching memories of love
- Alone and naked by the weeping tree,
- And indolent with inward longing move
- Your slim and sallow limbs despondently.
- If love came warm and burning to your dream,
- And filled you all your avid veins require,
- You would lie sadly still beside the stream,
- Sobbing in torture of that vivid fire;
- The same low sky would weave its fading blue,
- The river still exhale its misty rain,
- The willow trail its waving over you,
- Your longing only quickened into pain.
- Bed your desire among the pressing grasses;
- Lonely lie, and let your thirsting breasts
- Lie on you, lonely, till the fever passes,
- Till the undulation of your longing rests.
- Max Eastman
- [Wang Wei was a great Chinese painter and poet, of the 8th century --Max Eastman]
- IN THIS high room, my room of quiet space,
- Sun-yellow softened for my happiness,
- I learn of you, Wang Wei, and of your loves;
- Your rhythmic fisher sweet with solitude
- Beneath a willow by the river stream;
- Your aged plum tree bearing lonely bloom
- Beside the torrent's thunder; misty buds
- Among your saplings; delicate-leaved bamboo.
- My room is sweet because of you, Wang Wei,
- Your tranquil and creative-fingered love
- So many mounds of mournful years ago
- In that cool valley where the colors lived.
- My ceiling slopes a little like far mountains.
- Your delicate-leaved bamboo can flourish here.
- Max Eastman
- HOURS when I love you, are like tranquil pools,
- The liquid jewels of the forest, where
- The hunted runner dips his hand, and cools
- His fevered ankles, and the ferny air
- Comes blowing softly on his heaving breast,
- Hinting the sacred mystery of rest.
- Max Eastman
- FLAME-Heart, take back your love. Swift, sure
- And poignant as the dagger to the mark,
- Your will is burning ever; it is pure.
- Mine is vague water welling through the dark,
- Holding all substances--except the spark.
- Picture the pleasure of the meadow stream
- When some clear striding naked-footed girl
- Cuts swift and straightly as a gleam
- Across its bosom ambling and aswirl
- With mooning eddies and soft lips acurl;
- Such was our meeting--fatefully so brief.
- I have no purpose and no power to clutch.
- Gleam onward, maiden, to your goal of grief;
- And I more sadly flow, remembering much,
- Yet doomed to take the form of all I touch.
- Max Eastman
- YOU make no answer. You have stolen away
- Deliberately in that twilight sorrow
- Where the dark flame that is your being shines
- So well. Mysterious and deeply tender
- In your motion you have softly left me,
- And the little path along the house is still.
- And I, a child forsaken of its mother,
- I, a pilgrim leaning for a friend,
- Grow faint, and tell myself in terror that
- My love reborn and burning shall yet bring you--
- More than friend and slender-bodied mother--
- sweet-passioned spirit, shining home!
- Max Eastman
- AGAIN this morning the bold autumn,
- Spreading through the woods her sacred fire,
- Brings the rich color of your presence
- Warmly luminous to my desire--
- Brings to my heart the dear wild worship,
- High and wayward as the windy air,
- And to my pulse the hot sweet passion
- Burning crimson like a poison there.
- Max Eastman
- THE flowers we planted in the tender spring,
- And through the summer watched their blossoming,
- Died with our love in autumn's thoughtful weather,
- Died and dropped downward altogether.
- Today in April in the vivid grass
- They flash again their laughter, pink and yellow,
- They wake before the frosty sunbeams pass,
- Gay bold to leave their chilly pillow.
- But love sleeps longer in his wintry bed,
- He sleeps as though the lifting light were dead,
- And spring poured not her colors on the meadow,
- He sleeps in his cold sober shadow.
- Max Eastman
- SO BRIGHT and soft is the sweet air of morning,
- And so tenderly the light descends,
- And blesses with its gentle-falling fingers
- All the leaves unto the valley's ends--
- It brings them all to being when it touches
- With its paleness every glowing vein;
- The wild and flaming hollows of the forest
- Kindle all their crimson in its rain;
- And every curve receives its share of morning,
- Every little shadow softly grows,
- And motion finds a melody more tender
- That like a phantom through the branches goes--
- So bright and soft and tranquil-rendering,
- And quiet in its giving, as though love,
- The morning dream of life, were born of longing,
- And really poured its being from above.
- Max Eastman
- SCARRED with sensuality and pain
- And weary labor in a mind not hard
- Enough to think, a heart too always tender,
- Sits the Christ of failure with his lovers.
- They are wiser than his parables,
- But he more potent, for he has the gift
- Of hopelessness, and want of faith, and love.
- Max Eastman
- TODAY I saw a face--it was a beak,
- That peered, with pale round yellow vapid eyes,
- Above the bloody muck that had been lips
- And teeth and chin. A plodding doctor poured
- Some water through a rubber down a hole
- He made in that black bag of horny blood.
- The beak revived, it smiled--as chickens smile.
- The doctor hopes he'll find the man a tongue
- To tell with, what he used to be.
- Max Eastman
- YOU came with your small tapering flame of passion
- Thinly burning like a nun's desire,
- Your eyes in slim and half-expectant fashion
- Faintly painting what your veins require
- With little pallid pyramids of fire.
- So very small and unfulfilled you sat,
- Building a little talk to keep you there,
- Your face and body pointed like a cat,
- Your legs not reaching down from any chair,
- Your thoughts not really reaching anywhere;
- So dumb and tiny--yet Love guessed your mood,
- And pressed his phial in its fervent bed,
- And poured his thrilling philtre in my blood,
- And all his lustre on your body shed,
- And hot enamel on the words you said;
- Your littleness became a monstrous thing,
- A rank retort, a hot and waiting vat,
- Your eyes green-copper like a snake in spring,
- And lusty-bold your laying off your hat,
- And fell your purpose like a hungry cat;
- The dark fell on us through our narrowed eyes,
- The heat lashed up around us from the floor,
- Encrimsoning the lips of our surprise
- To sway like music, and like burning pour
- Across the truth that parted us before.
- Max Eastman
- LOVE, often your delicate fingers beckon,
- And always I follow.
- Oh, if I could stay, and possess your beauty
- Beckoning always!
- Max Eastman
- A LIGHT is laughing thro' the scattered rain,
- A color quickens in the meadow;
- Drops are still, upon the window-pane--
- They cast a silver shadow.
- Max Eastman
- A MYRIAD curious fishes,
- Tiny and pink and pale,
- All swimming north together
- With rhythmical fin and tail--
- A mountain surges among them,
- They dart and startle and float,
- Mere wiggling minutes of terror,
- Into that mountain's throat.
- Max Eastman
- TRUTH, be more precious to me than the eyes
- Of happy love; burn hotter in my throat
- Than passion; and possess me like my pride;
- More sweet than freedom; more desired than joy;
- More sacred than the pleasing of a friend.
- Max Eastman
- SOMETIMES a child's voice crying on the street
- Comes winging like an arrow through the wind
- To pierce my breast with you, my baby, and
- My pen is weak, and all my thinking dreams
- Are mist of yearning for the touch of you.
- Max Eastman
- IN YOUR lips moving fervently,
- Your eyes hot with fire,
- Life seems immortally young with desire,
- Life seems impetuous,
- Hungrily free,
- Having no faith but its burning to be.
- You could dance laughingly,
- Draw where you move,
- Hearts, hands and voices pouring you love.
- Youth be a carnival,
- Life be the queen,
- You could go dancing and singing and seen!
- Whence came that tenderness
- Cruel and wild,
- Arming with murder the hand of a child?
- Whence came that breaking fire,
- Nursed and caressed
- With passion's white fingers for tyranny's breast?
- In your soul sacredly,
- Deeper than fear,
- Burns there a miracle dreadful to hear?
- Virgin of murder,
- Was it God's breath,
- Begetting a savior, that filled you with Death?
- Max Eastman
- YOU walk as vivid as a sunny storm
- Across the drinking meadows, through the eyes
- Of stricken men, with light and fury mingled,
- Making passionate and making young.
- You drive the mists, and lift the drooping heads,
- And in the sultry place of custom raise
- The naked colors of abounding life,
- And sound the crimson windy call of liberty.
- Max Eastman
- MY HEART is sick because of all the eyes
- That look upon you drinkingly.
- They almost touch you with their fever look!
- keep your beauty like a mystic gem,
- Clear-surfaced--give no fibre grain of hold
- To those prehensile amorous bold eyes!
- My heart is sick!
- O love, let not my heart
- Corrupt the flower of your liberty--
- Go spend your beauty like the summer sky
- That makes a radius of every glance,
- And with your morning color light them all!
- Max Eastman
- YOUR eyes were gem-like in that dim deep chamber
- Hushed and sombre with imprisoned fire,
- With yellow ghostly globes of intense aether
- Potent as the rays of pure desire.
- Your voice was startled into vivid wonder,
- When the winged wild whining mystic wheel
- Took flight and shot the dark with frosty crashings
- Like an ice-berg splitting to the keel.
- Your flesh was never warmer to my passion
- Than when, moving in that lumor green,
- We saw with eyes our fragile bones enamoured
- Clasping sadly on the pallid screen.
- You seemed so virginal and so undreaming
- Of the burning hunger in my eyes,
- To peer more fever-deeply in your being
- Than the very death of passion lies.
- The subtle-tuned shy motions of your spirit,
- Fashioned through the ages for the sun,
- Were dumb in that green lustre-haunted cavern
- Where you walked a naked skeleton;
- Slim-hipped and fluent and of lovely motion,
- Living to the tip of every bone,
- And ah, too exquisitely vivid-moving
- Ever to lie wanly down alone--
- To lie forever down so still and slender,
- Tracing on the ancient screen of night
- That naked and pale writing of the wonder
- Of your beauty breathing in the light.
- Max Eastman
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