A Cold Milan Night

Oh, rages I wrote of, and unfettered sorrow,

On cream-white pages when I was forlorn

And laid ever in waking for fear of tomorrow

And, too, fear of dreaming the things you had sworn.

 

Let Heaven split open, and send me a sign

To remind me the Earth is but temporal sin

It was Heaven within you, it resembled divine

What a new Godless place without you I live in.

 

All of it--ended! All of it--waste!

Oh, but in that sweet moment, it was violent delight,

And my heart charred to ashes for one savage taste--

Was it foolish or lovely to lie with you at night?

 

In sorrows unending I flush with desire

And blush; it was ardent, those moments we kissed

For you I was reckless, for you I crossed fire

But it was not brave"I, too weak to resist.

 

Wrung-out fate! Ragged hope

That I thought for and fought for

You saw how I suffered, how I could not cope,

It was sadness to lose you, and what was it wrought for?

To this blindness and darkness? To wander and grope?

 

And I trouble to know that I never knew you, never knew you!

When I, yet a stranger, lay awake in your arms,

It was falsehood we loved in, when I gave myself to you,

Yielding fervent and willing to your stranger charms. 

 

Fools rush in. Yet the woman who stood there before you

Desired not only material love-making.

She was foolish and sweet and prepared to adore you,

Heart so sadly exposed for the spurning and breaking.

 

What ruins I built for myself when I met you;

True, they never were more than the fractured half-frame,

And trapped under their wreckage it is hard to forget you:

Would that I had burnt back into ash with that flame!

 

Now the dusts have all settled. I leave without curses

Or angers against you despite that strange woe,

I take heart in the words that flow forth into verses--

The sole comfort which in your cold absence I know!  

 

What was that riddle thing that I lacked and I lacked?

What was the sweet something you were searching for?

What odd little wonder for which I was wracked--

I am one-half of precious, but darling, no more.

 

Take your indifferent words, and your cold legal phrases,

And I too accede I wax prolix, I write

Empty love-poems emptily singing your praises

So alone, to a stranger a cold Milan night.