THE TUNNEL

I have made you a child in the womb,

Holding you in sweet and final darkness.

All day as I walk out

I carry you about.

I guard you close in secret where

Cold eyed people cannot stare.

I am melted in the warm dear fire,

Lover and mother in the same desire.

Yet I am afraid of your eyes

And their possible surprise.

Would you be angry if I let you know

That I carried you so?

I could kiss you to death

Hoping that, your protest obliterated,

You would be

Utterly me.

Yet I know — how well!—

Like a shell,

Hollow and echoing,

Death would be,

With a roar of the past

Like the roar of the sea.

And what is lifeless I cannot kill!

So you would make death work your will.

In most intimate touch we meet,

Lip to lip,

Breast to breast,

Sweet.

Suddenly we draw apart

And start.

Like strangers surprised at a road's turning

We see,

I, the naked you;

You, the naked me.

There was something of neither of us

That covered the hours,

And we have only touched each other's bodies

Through veils of flowers.

But let us smile kindly,

Like those already dead,

On the warm flesh

And the marriage bed.

The blanched stars are withered with light.

The moon is pale with trying to remember something.

Light, straining for a stale birth,

Distends the darkness.

I, in the midst of this travail,

Bring forth —

The solitude is so vast

I am glad to be freed of it.

Is it the moon I see there,

Or does my own white face

Hang in blank agony against the sky

As if blinded with giving?

Little inexorable lips at my breast

Drink me out of me

In a fine sharp stream.

Little hands tear me apart

To find what they need.

I am weak with love of you,

Little body of hate!