The Equinox (Volume I, Number III)

THE EQUINOX gently, even as Spring’s flying feet touch with unaccustomed primroses the wood, I say it—She was bad.” Then the third worm, which came from the woman’s heart, turned to the other two, and said: “Tam her heart . . . her beautiful, beautiful heart. “What do you know of the deeds of the Queen who were never in her council chamber? “When you were bold, I was perhaps afraid, and when you exulted, there was I know not what trouble of sadness throbbing within me. All that you were I sustained: all your pleasure stirred through me, and you but harvested that which I sowed. “When you were all aflame, it was I who lit you, and you could not even be sad without me. “Not less tender than the inviting curl—like a curled and fluffy feather of coral—with which you who were her lips made welcome to some man, was the slow hypnotic wave of my thurible with whose essence I drenched ever cell of her body. I say that she was good, for she was human and she loved, oh! so sweetly, so delicately, so tenderly. “ What you did, you, her lips, her eyes and her other senses, was but to make vain effigies of our interior delight, to shatter in the broken shards of translation the mysterious silent beauty of the vase itself. “J, the woman’s heart of her, was like to a cave were thousands of voices of unborn children cried softly in the dark, where one felt their outstretching hands in pale and piteous appeal, as one may hear the early lilies break through the encompassing earth. In me were the seed of kisses that could only burst to flower in a hundred years to come. 322