Masculine souls pass across the mirrors: 
Whirling, gliding ecstasies—­
Retreating, retreating,
Dimly, dimly,
Like dreams fading across the mirrors.

Then the mirrors,
Stark and brilliant in the sunshine,
Blank as the desert,
Blank as the Sphinx,
Winking golden eyes in the twinkles of light,
Silent, immutable, vacuous infinity,
Illimitable capacity for absorption,
Absorbing nothing.

Have the shapes and the shadows been swallowed up
In your recesses without depth,
You drinkers of life,
Twinkling maliciously
Your golden yellow eyes,
Mirrors winking in the sunshine?

PENELOPE

Gray old spinners,
Weaving with the crafty fibers of your souls;
Nothing was given you but those impalpable threads.

Yet you have bound the race,
Stranglers,
With your silver spun mysteries. 
All the cruel,
All the mad,
The foolish,
And the beautiful, too: 
It all belongs to you
Since the first time
That you began to drop the filmy threads
When the world was half asleep.

Sometimes you are young girls;
Sometimes there are roses in your hair. 
But I know you—­
Sitting back there in the hollow shadows of your wombs. 
The crafty fibers of your souls
Are woven in and out
With the fibers of life.

POOR PEOPLE’S DREAMS

Sometimes women with eyes like wet green berries
Glide across the slick mirror of their own smiles
And vanish through lengths of gold and marble drawing rooms. 
The marble smiles,
As sensuous as snow;
Hips of the Graces;

Shoulders of Clytie;
Breasts frozen as foam,
Frozen as camelia bloom;
Mounds of marble flesh,
Inexplicable wonder of white....

I dream about statuesque beauties
Who look from the shadows of opera boxes;
Or elegant ladies in novels of eighteen thirty,
At the hunt ball... 
Reflections in a polish floor,
A portrait by Renoir,
A Degas dancing girl,
English country houses,
An autumn afternoon in the Bois,
Something I have read of... 
In sleep one vision retreating through another,
Like mirrors being doors to other mirrors,
Satin, and lace, and white shoulders,
And elegant ladies,
Dancing, dancing.

FOR WIVES AND MISTRESSES

Death,
Being a woman,
Being passive like all final things,
Being a mother,
Waits.

Shining faces
Gray and melt into her flesh. 
Death envies those asleep in her,
Little children who have come back,
Fiery faces,
Bright for a moment in the darkness,
Extinguished softly in her womb.

PORTRAITS

PORTRAIT OF RICH OLD LADY