The Dressing of a Young Girl

It is the time when the brook behind the house fills the pool with-

in;

As she passes. The wind eating at her skin and the ground

sticking wetly to her feet,

She goes to the room where the long mirror waits that she used

to dust

As a piece of ancestral armour on rainy days, to put in it,

As wind clothes water, her first silk dress.

It is the curtain that will open on the first act of her world

And behind which arrangements are made for the others;

Of those which the audience, cigarette in hand, sees only as con-

cealed forms

Of the demand which the pretense makes on the real: the cur-

tain's own

Faint air of expectancy; the ripple of a stagehand in the folds;

Or even a sound! through the surface of this water the bottom

moves

Even as the wind brings blood to the skin.

The burden of her beauty hangs lightly from her shoulders

As, by the lakeside, she feels only the drop that has risen,-

That clings to the pale eyelid-thin petal of the day:

Contained by its own fulness; clothed in transparency-

Until the wind lifts it into the hollow of the wave of the stamen;

Brushed by the large steed's flank of some armed and passing

knight

To post in the wash day dance of his rinsing hooves . . .

On some high flat of land where the last wave ends with the

sewerage

Poured from a muddy trap; where the drying of the grave sweet-

ens the crop,

A woman bends with her basket in her peasant's dress:

The huge canopy of another act

Which no audience has the eyes to see.