Haydn Carruth
ALICE, SWEET ALICE
For what is rhetoric but the will trying to
do the work of the imagination?
Alice, sweet Alice, come to me.
Eyes like the wide lake's mirror.
o
in all glasses what last deep
Of green surrounds, for lost the keep
Unbounded
is,
lost yet a place:
An empty tilting Grecian vase
Sinks slow as a cloud to lowest sand,
A long, long journey downward. And
Shouting in any fervor just
Makes bubbles and a silent lust.
Alice, my love, she is combing
The brown leaves of her hair.
The cruel practitioner of love
Unknown
is
as the moulting dove,
For gestures of the practiced art
Assumed a fatal strength. Sweetheart
-W.
B.
Yeats
And sweetheart played at matching faith
But games are murder, word
is
scathe.
