Читать книгу Days and Dreams: Poems - Madison Julius Cawein - Страница 22

Deep are the lilies here that lay

Lush, lambent leaves along our way,

Or pollen-dusty bob and float

White nenuphars about our boat

This side the woodland we have reached;

Two rapid strokes our skiff is beached.

There is no path. Heaped foxgrapes choke

Huge trunks they wrap. This giant oak

Floods from the Alleghanies bore

To wedge here by this sycamore;

Its wounded bulk, heart-rotted white,

Lights ghostly foxfire in the night.

Now oar we through this willow fringe

The bulging shore that bosks—a tinge

Of green mists down the marge;—where old,

Scarred cottonwoods build walls of shade

With breezy balsam pungent; bowled

Around vined trunks the floods have made

Concentric hollows. On we pass.

As we pass, we pass, we pass,

In daisy jungles deep as grass,

A bubbling sparrow flirts above

In wood-words with its woodland love:

A white-streaked woodpecker afar

Knocks: slant the sun dashed, each a star,

Three glittering jays flash over: slim

The piping sand-snipes skip and skim

Before us: and a finch or thrush—

Who may discover where such sing?—

The silence rinses with a gush

Of mellow music gurgling.

On we pass, and onward oar

To yon long lip of ragged shore,

Where from yon rock spouts, babbling frore

A ferny spring; where dodging by

Rests sulphur-disced that butterfly;

Mallows, rank crowded in for room,

'Mid wild bean and wild mustard bloom;

Where fishers 'neath those cottonwoods

Last Spring encamped those ashes say

And charcoal boughs.—'T is long till buds!—

Here who in August misses May?