Читать книгу Door in the Mountain - Jean Valentine - Страница 92

Asleep over Lines from Willa Cather

Now I lay me desolate to sleep

Cold in the sound of the underground flood,

Brushed in half-sleep by the phantom plant

Pressed in the book by my bed

Blue green leaves, large and coarse-toothed… With big white blossoms like Easter lilies… Latour recognized the noxious datura. In its dead shade I lay me down to sleep. The reins inside my head that hold my hope When it leaps, in waking life, fall slack, And, beyond the world of falling things, With flesh like air, and an assumed agreement Between my body and the way it takes, I walk aimlessly by a green and perfect river. The garden is here, as I knew it would be; The garden imagined through oblique windows in paintings, Earth's lost plantation, waiting for all, all, All to be well: the fountain translates the sun. I do not see but know God follows me, And I follow, without fear of madness, Paths and turnings that are both wild and formal, Of all colors or none, tiger-lily and rock, Pools dead with the weight of fallen leaves, and falls, Follow after him I love, who waits in the garden. Mercy, Pity, Fear and Shame Spring in this garden, for it is earth's. My body is not air, it casts a shadow. At the next turning I come upon him I love Waiting by the tree from my childhood that drops White petals that hugely snow on the whitening ground. He takes my arm and we walk a little way Away from the tree towards the shining river Running clear green through the garden. The allegorists' arrow has struck me down. I freeze in the noise of the flood. When my love bends to speak, it is a language I do not know: I answer and have no voice, I am deaf, I am blind, I reach out to touch his face And touch a spot of spittled clay, my eye, Hiding the garden, the river, the tree.