Long afternoons of childhood ..., still not
Life, still only Growth,
that tugs at the knees-, defenseless waiting-time.
And between what one will be, perhaps,
and this brinkless existence-: deaths,
uncountable. Love possessively encircles
the child whose secrets are always betrayed
and promises him to the future; not his.
Afternoons, that he spent alone, staring
from one mirror to another; querying the riddle of his own
name: Who? Who?- But the others
sweep homeward and overwhelm him.
What the window, what the path,
what the musty odor of a drawer
had confided to him yesterday: they drown it out, thwart it.
He becomes theirs again.
As tendrils sometimes fling themselves out from thicker
bushes, so his desire will cast itself out
from the tangle of family, swaying in clearness.
But they dull his glance daily with their inhabited
walls, that glance up which meets the dogs
and sees taller flowers
still nearly eye to eye.
Oh how far it is from this
supervised creature to all that someday
will be his miracle or his undoing.
His immature
power learns guile between the traps.
But the sparkle of his future love
has been moving among the stars for ages,
in full force. Which terror
will one day rip the heart from him,
so that he loses the way he was fleeing
and comes, obedient and cheerful, under its influence?
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