| |
| OF evenings hangs above the restaurant | |
| A humid, wild and heavy air. | |
| The Springtide spirit, brooding, pestilent, | |
| Commands the drunken outcries there. | |
| |
| Far off, above the alley’s mustiness, | 5 |
| Where bored gray summerhouses lie, | |
| The baker’s sign swings gold through dustiness, | |
| And loud and shrill the children cry. | |
| |
| Beyond the city stroll the exquisites, | |
| At every dusk and all the same: | 10 |
| Their derbies tilted back, the pretty wits | |
| Are playing at the ancient game. | |
| |
| Upon the lake but feebly furious | |
| Soft screams and creaking oar-locks sound. | |
| And in the sky, blasé, incurious, | 15 |
| The moon beholds the earthly round. | |
| |
| And every evening, dazed and serious, | |
| I watch the same procession pass; | |
| In liquor, raw and yet mysterious, | |
| One friend is mirrored in my glass. | 20 |
| |
| Beside the scattered tables, somnolent | |
| And dreary waiters stick around. | |
| “In vino veritas!” shout violent | |
| And red-eyed fools in liquor drowned. | |
| |
| And every evening, strange, immutable, | 25 |
| (Is it a dream no waking proves?) | |
| As to a rendezvous inscrutable | |
| A silken lady darkly moves. | |
| |
| She slowly passes by the drunken ones | |
| And lonely by the window sits; | 30 |
| And from her robes, above the sunken ones, | |
| A misty fainting perfume flits. | |
| |
| Her silks’ resilience, and the tapering | |
| Of her ringed fingers, and her plumes, | |
| Stir vaguely like dim incense vaporing, | 35 |
| Deep ancient faiths their mystery illumes. | |
| |
| I try, held in this strange captivity, | |
| To pierce the veil that darkling falls— | |
| I see enchanted shores’ declivity, | |
| And an enchanted distance calls. | 40 |
| |
| I guard dark secrets’ tortuosities. | |
| A sun is given me to hold. | |
| An acrid wine finds out the sinuosities | |
| That in my soul were locked of old. | |
| |
| And in my brain the soft slow flittering | 45 |
| Of ostrich feathers waves once more; | |
| And fathomless the azure glittering | |
| Where two eyes blossom on the shore. | |
| |
| My soul holds fast its treasure renitent, | |
| The key is safe and solely mine. | 50 |
| Ah, you are right, drunken impenitent! | |
| I also know: truth lies in wine. | |
| |
