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

lonely nights that fled
No swifter than thou came and brided me
Who held thee as the fabric of thy bed
Where, turning on thy pillow’s cheek, thy kiss
Took in thy citadel an enemy
Against whose mouth thy mouth sleeps on—like this.

XLI
    H ER unripe shallow breast is green among
The windy bloom of drunken apple trees,
And seven fauns importunate as bees
To sip the thin young honey of her tongue.
The old satyr, leafed and hidden, dreams her kiss
His beard amid, leaving his mouth in sight;
Dreams her body in a moony night
Shortening and shuddering into his;
    Then sees a faun, bolder than the rest,
Slide his hand upon her sudden breast,
And feels the life in him go cold, and pass
Until the fire that kiss had brought to be
Gutters and faints away; ’tis night, and he
Laughing wrings the bitter wanton grass.

XLII
    B ENEATH the apple tree Eve’s tortured shape
Glittered in the Snake’s, her riven breast
Sloped his coils and took the sun’s escape
To augur black her sin from east to west.
In winter’s night man may keep him warm
Regretting olden sins he did omit;
With fetiches the whip of blood to charm,
Forgetting that with breath he’s heir to it.
    But old gods fall away, the ancient Snake
Is throned and crowned instead, and has for minion
That golden apple which will never slake
But ever feeds man’s crumb of fire, when plover
And swallow and shrill northing birds whip over
Nazarene and Roman and Virginian.

XLIII
    lets see I’ll say—between two brief balloons
of skirts I saw grave chalices of knees
and momently the cloyed and cloudy bees
where hive her honeyed thighs those little moons
    these slender moons’ unsunder I would break
so soft I’d break that hushed virginity
of sleep that in her narrow house would she
find me drowsing when she came awake—
    no—madam I love your daughter—I will say
    from out some leafed dilemma of desire
the wind hales yawning spring still half undressed
the hand that once did short to sighs her breast
now slaps her white behind to rosy fire
    —sir your health your money how are they—

XLIV
    I F THERE be grief, then let it be but rain,
And this but silver grief for grieving’s sake,
If these green woods be dreaming here to wake
Within my heart, if I should rouse again.
    But I shall sleep, for where is any death
While in these blue hills slumbrous overhead
I’m rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,
This earth that holds me fast will find me breath.

Books by
WILLIAM FAULKNER
    Soldiers’ Pay

Mosquitoes

Sartoris

The Sound and the Fury

As I Lay Dying

Sanctuary

These Thirteen

Light in August

Doctor Martino

Pylon

Absalom, Absalom!

The Unvanquished

The Wild Palms

The Hamlet

Go Down, Moses

Intruder in the Dust

Knight’s Gambit

Collected Stories

Requiem for a Nun

A Fable

Big Woods

The Town

The Mansion

The Reivers
    POETRY
The Marble Faun

A Green Bough