y
And know not what they say:
Rain,
Rain.

But after the whirl of fright
And great shouts and flashes,
The pounding clashes
And deep slashes,
After the scattered ashes

Of the night,
Heaven's height
Abashes
With a gleam through unknown lashes
Of delicious points of light.

ANNE KNISH
_Opus 191_

THE black bark of a dog
Made patterns against the night.
And little leaves flute-noted across the moon.

I seemed to feel your soft looks
Steal across that quiet evening room
Where once our souls spoke, long ago.

For that was of a vastness;
And this night is of a vastness . . .

There was a dog-bark then--
It was the sound
Of my rebellious and incredulous heart
Its patterns twined about the stars
And drew them down
And devoured them.

EMANUEL MORGAN
_Opus 45_

AN angel, bringing incense, prays
Forever in that tree . . .
I go blind still when the locust sways
Those honey-domes for me.

All the fragrances of dew, O angel, are there,
The myrrhic rapture of young hair,
The lips of lust;
And all the stenches of dust,
Even the palm and the fingers of a hand burnt bare
With a curling sweet-smelling crust,
And the bitter staleness of old hair,
Powder on a withering bust . . .

The moon came through the window to our bed.
And the shadows of the locust-tree
On your white sweet body made of me,
Of my lips, a drunken bee. . . .
O tree-like Spring, O blossoming days,
I, who some day shall be dead,
Shall have ever a lover to sway with me.
For when my face decays
And the earth moulds in my nostrils, shall there not be
The breath therein of a locust-tree,
The seed, the shoot of a locust-tree,
The honey-domes of a locust-tree,
Till lovers go blind and sway with me?--

O tree-like Spring, O blossomy days,
To sway as long as the locust sways!

EMANUEL MORGAN
_Opus 14_

BESIDE the brink of dream
I had put out my willow-roots and leaves
As by a stream
Too narrow for the invading greaves
Of Rome in her trireme . . .
Then you came--like a scream
Of beeves.

ANNE KNISH
_Opus 80_

OH my little house of glass!
How carefully
I have planted shrubbery
To plume before your transparency.
Light is too amorous of you,
Transfusing through and through
Your panes with an effulgence never new.
Sometimes
I am terribly tempted
To throw the stones myself.