THE TUNNEL
by: Evelyn Scott
- 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 Tunnel" is reprinted
from Precipitations. Evelyn Scott. New York: Nicholas
L. Brown, 1920. |
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POEMS BY EVELYN SCOTT |
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