| |
| 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 | 5 |
| 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 | 10 |
| 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. | 15 |
| 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 | 20 |
| 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 | 25 |
| 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. | 30 |
| |
| 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, | 35 |
| 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? | 40 |
| 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, | 45 |
| Were you he, after all, and I never | |
| Saw you or felt you in kissing? | |
| —Yet sometimes my heart was trammelled | |
| With fear, evader! | |
| |
| Then was it you | 50 |
| After all, this cold, hard man? | |
| —Ah no, look up at me, | |
| Tell me it isn’t true, | |
| That you’re only frightening me! | |
| |
| You will not stir, | 55 |
| 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, | 60 |
| I am frightened, I am frightened of you | |
| And of everything. | |
| O God!—God too | |
| Has deceived me in everything, | |
| In everything. | 65 |
| |
