![]() ![]() It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter midnight, I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.Ī shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the coffin, It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is blank here, for reasons. It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman’s, I sit low in a straw-bottom chair and carefully darn my grandson’s stockings. I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid, Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake. My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions, I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.īe careful darkness! already what was it touch’d me? I thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one, I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away. He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover, He rises with me silently from the bed.ĭarkness, you are gentler than my lover, his flesh was sweaty and panting, I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me. I roll myself upon you as upon a bed, I resign myself to the dusk. I am she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly, My truant lover has come, and it is dark.ĭouble yourself and receive me darkness, Receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without him. I am the actor, the actress, the voter, the politician, The emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box, He who has been famous and he who shall be famous after to-day, The stammerer, the well-form’d person, the wasted or feeble person. Well do they do their jobs those journeymen divine, Only from me can they hide nothing, and would not if they could, I reckon I am their boss and they make me a pet besides, And surround me and lead me and run ahead when I walk, To lift their cunning covers to signify me with stretch’d arms, and resume the way Onward we move, a gay gang of blackguards! with mirth-shouting music and wild-flapping pennants of joy! I am the ever-laughing-it is new moon and twilight, I see the hiding of douceurs, I see nimble ghosts whichever way I look, Cache and cache again deep in the ground and sea, and where it is neither ground nor sea. I am a dance-play up there! the fit is whirling me fast! I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn, I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, And I become the other dreamers. Now I pierce the darkness, new beings appear, The earth recedes from me into the night, I saw that it was beautiful, and I see that what is not the earth is beautiful. I stand in the dark with drooping eyes by the worst-suffering and the most restless, I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them, The restless sink in their beds, they fitfully sleep. The female that loves unrequited sleeps, And the male that loves unrequited sleeps, The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps, And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep. The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep, The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps, The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep? And the murder’d person, how does he sleep? The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his palm on the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on the hip of the husband, The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed, The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs, And the mother sleeps with her little child carefully wrapt. ![]() The wretched features of ennuyes, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists, The gash’d bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong-door’d rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates, The night pervades them and infolds them. How solemn they look there, stretch’d and still, How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles. I wander all night in my vision, Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers, Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping. ![]()
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