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,

She has attained the permanence She dreamed of, where old stones lie sunning
Untended stalks blow over her Even and swift, like young men running
Always in the heart she loved Others had lived, — she heard their laughter
She lies wh...

To me, one silly task is like another
I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride
This flesh will never give a child its mother,— Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,

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

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

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...

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

The dark is thrown Back from the brightness, like hair Cast over a shoulder
I am alone,
Four years older;
Like the chairs and the walls Which I once watched brighten With you beside me

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...

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees, Facing a sheer sky
Everything moved, — a bell hung ready to strike, Sun and reflection wheeled by
When the bare eyes were before me And the hissing hair, Held up at a window, seen through a do...