Canticles

I.

Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires
Of gold, with great wide eyes and bronze-nailed feet,
Crawl towards your body my long, green desires.

In the full torrid noon of summer heat
I have bedded you in a nook at a field's edge,
Where the tanned meslin shoots a shivering wedge.

Heat is suspended o'er us like a dais;
The sky prolongs the vast expanse, gold-plated;
Afar the Scheldt a dwindling, silver way is;

Lascivious, huge, you lie there yet unsated;
Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires
Of gold, crawl back to you my spent desires.

II.

My love shall be the gorgeous sun that robes
With torrid summer and with idlenesses
Your body's naked slopes and hilly globes,

Showering its light upon you in caresses,
And this new brazier's contact shall be in
Tongues of an ambient gold that lick your skin.

The tragic, rolling red of dawn and eve,
And the day's beauty you shall be; with hues
Of splendour you a billowy robe shall weave;

Your flesh shall be like fabulous statues,
Which in the desert sang, and shone like roses,
When morning burned their blocks with apotheoses.

III.

I would not choose the sunflowers that unclose
In daylight; nor the lily long of stem;
Nor roses loving winds to fondle them;
No, nor great nenuphars whose pulp morose,

And wide, cold eyes, charged with eternity,
Upon their imaging pond yawn idle-lipped
Their stirless dreams; nor flowers despotic, whipped
By wrath and wind along a hostile sea,

To symbolize you. No, but shivering wet
Under the dawn, with great red calyx leaves
Mingling as jets of blood are fused in sheaves,
A group of garden dahlias closely set,

Which, in voluptuous days of autumn, bright
With matter's hot maturity and heats,
Like monstrous and vermilion women's teats,
Grow stiff beneath the golden hands of light.