Louise Bogan

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their
To eat dusty bread

Now that I have your face by heart,
I
Less at its features than its darkening
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,

Come, let us tell the weeds in
How we are poor, who once had riches,
And lie out in the sparse and
Pastures that the cows have trodden,

Here, in the withered arbor, like the arrested wind,
Straight sides, carven knees,
Stands the statue, with hands flung out in alarm Or remonstrances
Over the lintel sway the woven bracts of the vine In a pattern of angles

I burned my life, that I might findA passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone
I broke my life, to seek

Now that I
How passion warms
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,—I'll lie here and

Since you would claim the sources of my
Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,
The reedy traps which other hands have
To close upon it

Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over

She has no need to fear the fall Of harvest from the laddered reach Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing From the steep beach
Nor hold to pain's effrontery Her body's bulwark, stern and savage, Nor be a glass, where to forsee Another's ravag...

We have struck the regions wherein we are keel or reef
The wind breaks over us,
And against high sharp angles almost splits into words,
And these are of fear or grief

Up from the bronze,
I
Water without a
Rush to its rest in air,

All night the cocks crew, under a moon like day,
And I, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast,
Shed tears, like a task not to be put away—-In the false light, false grief in my happy bed,
A labor of tears, set against joy's u...