The ravens of my thoughts

The ravens of my thoughts
come to your waters to drink,
under dream-mists of moonlight,
settling darkly on the shore.

Recalling fairest meadows
on watercolor mornings,
breaths full of wild thyme
and new-blooming heather.

Afternoons of leisure,
the running freely about,
the clear light and music
of bright laughing voices.

The peace of purple twilight,
the drowsy lull of nature,
the silver stars enkindled
in your ocean-jewel eyes.

With a long thirsting slaked,
the ravens, on shining wings,
like stray shadows on the wind
to the sleeping woods return.

Imperatrix Ignis

Clare's wakeful dreamings flew up like flames
out on the raging sun-meads of Empyrean.
Worlds leapt from the gladsome furnace of her thought,
colliding and expanding in splendor as they arose.
The ascendancy eclipsed even the expanse of heaven
as the revelation of her designs became fearsome and fair.
The builded realms were arrayed as exquisite abodes
wherein dwelt many throngs of flaming personages,
like unto angels in shining attire, immersed in living light:
fiery choirs, radiant and mirthful in their ministrations,
uplifting choruses to She who had deigned to bring them
from Her Regal Mind into the bright fire-spheres of Life.
At the core of the edifice pulsed an immense Fire-Heart,
from which surged the lava-blood of Life Essence.
She beheld the lofty resplendence, and was well-pleased.
But the gravity of her triumph brought about utter defeat:
The blazing structure, under its own beautiful weight, collapsed
and oh! how the interlaced sinews of spectacular fire,
the joyful assemblies, and the entire glorious metropolis,
streamed down from the sky as burning embers and ash,
yea! as a very Anti-Phoenix, into the darkness of Oblivion.

Ruined Estate

When the bricks of these buildings were young,
when the songs of the years were yet unsung,
when wormwood waves lapped not these shores,
and the light danced glad through open doors;
it was then that fair Eden was found in your eyes,
with the music and fragrance of bright summer skies,
when apples and apricots swelled in the trees
and gardens were merry with the droning of bees;
but those windows are shuttered, the bricks are decayed,
the seas are now bitter, and summer delayed,
all the bees have departed, the gardens are bare,
and shadows and shriveled fruit only are there.

Agnes Abroad

It was a moon-scorched midnight;
the stars were thoroughly dissolved.
Agnes arose from where she had lain too long.
The deep grass remembered her sleeping frame
as she rubbed bright eyes with fragile fingers.
The maples danced in the warm wind like marionettes,
moving many hands to their own native rhythms.
Songs from wild and unseen mouths
crowded upon the outer edge of silence.
A startled dove took sudden flight
and fled towards the shadowed hill-slopes.
Agnes breathed, and gazed into the black north.
She would fain be beyond those hills
before the first kindling of dawn.
And so, with nightgown fluttering like white fire,
and with bare and furtive feet, she pressed on.

Passing through Perkins

These mountains are not lovely, they
are clothed in tattered brown and grey
like the local old men who go
to sit outside the Texaco
each morning to mumble and grimly joke
and breathe and blow tobacco smoke
and squint at cars as they pass by
beneath the solemn bearded sky
stained by smolderings in the hills
shrouding barns and abandoned mills
which loom up wraith-like from the past
and stand remembering to the last.