I was a child in a small midwestern town.
It was a still summer afternoon
Yellow under the great maple trees.
Perfumes of the close-shorn grass and the entranced
Loose-hanging clusters of dark-laced boughs
Sealed me into the heat of a grape-enclosed
Urn of summer’s drowse
Under the arbors of vine-weaving ease
When a beautiful woman, my mother’s friend,
Famed for her girlhood of violets and beau-taking
Sashes, valances at dances, of supreme
Dew-drenched, liquid-kissing, cyclamen-haunted eyes,
Came to inform us that you were dead.
Into which with the speaking of far-away death was mixed
A coquettish condemnation of ardor so fierce
It seemed leopards might spring from the dots and cirques
Of a heat-ringed shade stippled by sun on the wands of the boughs.
And a vast sadness commingled with a vast sense
Of a mystery so obscurely profound
Seemed to wring from the simple antiphonies
Of an everywhere that the trees described
A music flowing up from their roots
And down through the whole shivering sap of their lives
Whereupon it seemed that I understood
Love, womanhood, and dancing.
On the Legend of a Dancer
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