132
PARTISAN REVIEW
With furtive flow of dank subluminous dreams;
She sleeps in a pale sunless watery bloom,
In shallow seas or deep pelagic gloom,
Submerged in the lifting of an endless tide-–
Yet now she feels strange agitations ride
Those lunar frequencies-she stirs
Breathing a life familiar but not hers;
The sweet-stabbing knowledge of an alien breath
Lifts her from slumber as from drowning death;
Out of milleniums the separate moments rise
To pluck at her eyelids and her darkened eyes;
Rising from ocean's blind profundities, she breaks
Into the glittering present-and awakes.
Through sleep's yet clinging mist
She sees him: Only the flexing wrist
And knee and elbow bent
Tell of his aquiline descent.
Vision of space! The lineal god revealed
Of cosmic road and interstellar field!
His beaked narrow profile testifies to flight
Through rage of suns and parabolas of light;
So the unfeathered angel sleeps beneath her gaze
Still faintly radiant with a cometary blaze.
Vision of space! And weeping woman bent
Over this unguessed royal lineament;
Not one of her billion-billion tried, discarded forms
Took shape of suns or deliverance of storms;
All her vast brood through paleozoic time
Prisoned in radial symmetry and lime--
She bends and broods; her slow tears drip
Hot wax upon his cheek and lip.
Scalded from dream he leaps to meet the eyes
Forbidden by gods most ancient and most wise;
And in the abrupt second, all his archangelic shape
Returns: the aquilated head, each arm a cape
Of heaven-defying feathers, while his feet
Make tattered fury of the bridal sheet,
