The Equinox (Volume I, Number III)

ADELA Through maze on maze of silent waterways, Guarded by lightless sentinel palaces, We glide; the soft plash of the oar, that sways Our life, like love does, laps—no softer seas Swoon in the bosom of Pacific bays! We are in tune with the infinite ecstasies, Adela! Sway with me, sway with me in the gondola! They hold us in, these tangled sepulchres That guard such ghostly life. They tower above Our passage like the cliffs of death. There stirs No angel from the pinnacles thereof. All broods, all breeds. But immanent as Hers That reigns is this most silent crown of love, Adela That broods on me, and is I, in the gondola. They twist, they twine, these white and black canals, Now stark with lamplight, now a reach of Styx. Even as our love—raging wild animals Suddenly hoisted on the crucifix To radiate seraphic coronals, Flowers, flowers—O let our light and darkness mix, Adela, Goddess and beast with me in the gondola! Come! though your hair be a cascade of fire, Your lips twin snakes, your tongue the lightning flash, Your teeth God’s grip on life, your face His lyre, 315