Les Fleurs d'Amour

When he says to her, "Look! I have something here to show

you,"

She smiles, expectant of flowers that change the hackneyed

view,

And waits, wondering what intimate, unknown rose it will

be,

Whether one leaf with a Chinese lyric that magically

Turns, later on, to a lotus of thought in the mind,

Or a tome where great, granite kings are confined

And the high head of a queen in whose monument brow

and lip

Are implicit all the urbane and tremendous splendors of

Egypt.

More royal than Antony dropping realms "as plates . . .

from his pocket,"

He proffers the universe like a choice flower placed in a

basket.

The sculptured eye of love looking by days and by nights

Has turned her brow to crystal and sees the white delights

Clustered within like lilies thick on a summer pond.

Discerning by what she treasures what she may choose to

want,

He shows her, at sunset, thunder's departing bouquet of

carnation haze,

Or, lifted magical out of the dust a miniature topaz

Toad with a yellowed-ivory, finer-than-Phidias hip

Where the joint moves with the delicate quiver of life in it,

Or gemmed in sand on the shore a shell with a Grecian

whorl,

Or a dove-gray stone where a fossil has flowered pale as a

pearl.

The wreath of assent that appears in her eyes reappears in

his smile,

The pleasing and pleased equalized as in balancing pans

of a scale,

Two colors that grow on their separate stalks and complete

one another

And meeting merge at the crown in a single polychrome

flower.