Читать книгу The Poems of Madison Cawein. Volume 2 (of 5) - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 28

See, sweetheart, how the lilies lay

Their lambent leaves about our way;

Or, pollen-dusty, bob and float

Their nenuphars around our boat.—

The middle of the stream is reached

Three strokes from where our boat was beached.

Look up. You scarce can see the sky,

Through trees that lean, dark, dense and high;

That, coiled with grape and trailing vine,

Build vast a roof of shade and shine;

A house of leaves, where shadows walk,

And whispering winds and waters talk.

There is no path. The saplings choke

The trunks they spring from. There an oak,

Floods from the Alleghanies bore,

Lies rotting; and that sycamore,

Which lays its bulk from shore to shore,—

Uprooted by the rain,—perchance

May be the bridge to some romance:

Its heart of punk, a spongy white,

Glows, ghostly foxfire, in the night.

Now opening through a willow fringe

The waters creep, one tawny tinge

Of sunset; and on either marge

The cottonwoods make walls of shade,

With breezy balsam pungent: large,

The gradual hills loom; darkly fade

The waters wherein herons wade,

Or wing, like Faëry birds, from grass

That mats the shore by which we pass.

On we pass; we rippling pass,

On sunset waters still as glass.

A vesper-sparrow flies above,

Soft twittering, to its woodland love.

A tufted-titmouse calls afar;

And from the west, like some swift star,

A glittering jay flies screaming. Slim

The sand-snipes and kingfishers skim

Before us; and some twilight thrush—

Who may discover where such sing?—

The silence rinses with a gush

Of limpid music bubbling.

On we pass.—Now let us oar

To yonder strip of ragged shore,

Where, from a rock with lichens hoar,

A ferny spring falls, babbling frore

Through woodland mosses. Gliding by

The sulphur-colored firefly

Lights its pale lamp where mallows gloom,

And wild-bean and wild-mustard bloom.—

Some hunter there within the woods

Last fall encamped, those ashes say

And campfire boughs.—The solitudes

Grow dreamy with the death of day.