Marble Faun & Green Bough by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online

the fallen day,
And a haughty star broke yellow musk
Where dead kings slept the long cold years away.
    The hushed voices on the stair of heaven
Upward mounting, wake each drowsing king;
The dawn is milk to swell her breast, her seven
Sorrows crown her with a choiring ring;
A star to fleck young Jesus’ eyes is given,
And white winds in the duskfilled sails to sing.

XXXV
    T HE courtesan is dead, for all her subtle ways,
Her bonds are loosed in brittle and bitter leaves;
Her last long backward look’s to see who grieves
The imminent night of her reverted gaze.
Another will reign supreme, now she is dead
And winter’s lean clean rain sweeps out her room,
For man’s delight and anguish: with old new bloom
Crowning his desire, garlanding his head.
    Thus the world, turning to cold and death
When swallows empty the blue and drowsy days
And lean rain scatters the ghost of summer’s breath—
The courtesan that’s dead, for all her subtle ways—
Spring will come! rejoice! But still is there
An old sorrow sharp as woodsmoke on the air.

XXXVI
    G USTY trees windily lean on green
eviscerated skies, the stallion, Wind,
against the sun’s gold collar stamps, to lean
his weight. And once the furrowed day behind,
the golden steed browses the field he breaks
and full of flashing teeth where he has been
trees, the waiting mare his neighing shakes,
hold his heaving shape a moment seen.
    Upon the hills, clashing the stars together,
stripping the tree of heaven of its blaze,
stabled, richly grained with golden weather—
    within the trees that he has reft and raped
his fierce embrace by riven boughs in shaped,
while on the shaggy hills he stamps and neighs.

XXXVII
    T he race’s splendor lifts her lip, exposes
Amid her scarlet smile her little teeth;
The years are sand the wind plays with; beneath,
The prisoned music of her deathless roses.
    Within frostbitten rock she’s fixed and glassed;
Now man may look upon her without fear.
But her contemptuous eyes back through him stare
And shear his fatuous sheep when he has passed.
    Lilith she is dead and safely tombed
And man may plant and prune with naught to bruit
His heired and ancient lot to which he’s doomed,
For quiet drowse the flocks when wolf is mute—
Ay, Lilith she is dead, and she is wombed,
And breaks his vine, and slowly eats the fruit.

XXXVIII
    L IPS that of thy weary all seem weariest,
And wearier for the curled and pallid sly
Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy
Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;
Lay no hand to heart, do not protest
That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,
For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled
With secret joy of thine own flank and breast.
    Weary thy mouth with smiling: canst thou bride
Thyself with thee, or thine own kissing slake?
Thy belly’s waking doth itself deride
With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake;
And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide
For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.

XXXIX
    L IKE to the tree that, young, reluctant yet
While sap’s but troubled rumor of green spring;
Like to the leaf that in warm bud does cling
In maidened sleep unreft though passionate;
Or like the cloud that, quicked and shaped for rain
But flees it in a silver hot despair;
The bird that dreams of flight and does not dare,
The sower who fears to sow and reaps no grain.
    Beauty or gold or scarlet, then long sleep:
All this does buy brave trafficking with breath,
That though gray cuckold Time be horned by Death,
Then Death in turn is cuckold, unawake.
But sown cold years the stolen bread you reap
By all the Eves unsistered since the Snake.

XL
    L ADY , unawares still bride of sleep,
To thine own self sweet prisoner and fell
Thrall to the vassalled garrison that keep
Thy soft unguarded breast’s white citadel;
    Alas, oft-cozened maid, who’d not be twain
Yet self-confounded, while importunates
The foe repulsed, and single, dost remain
The frequent darling of the gods and fates.
    Thou chaste? Why, I’ve lain