Sonnets and Love Songs

I have built my temple — wall and face —
Outside the idea of space,
Complex — built as a full-rigged ship;
I made its walls of my fears,
Its turrets many of weird thoughts and tears —
And that strange temple thus unfurled
Like a death's-head flag, that like a whip
Stinging around my soul is curled,
Is far more real than the world.

How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever consciousness begins the task
The task's accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,
Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,
Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces
And get a whole world on their forgot causing;
And, when a thought would unmask our soul's masking,
Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.

There are fallen angels in the way you look
        And great bridges over silent streams at your smile.
Your gestures are a lonely princess dreaming over a book
        At a window over a lake, on some distant isle.
 
If I were to stretch my hand and touch yours that would be
        Dawn behind the turrets of a city in some East.
The words hidden in my gesture would be moonlight on the sea
        Of your being something in my soul like gaiety in a feast.
 
Let your silence tell me of the numberless dreams that are you.
        Let the drooping of your eyelids prolong landscapes far away.
The jets of water return on the listening of being untrue
And this is the flower I pluck, with a sound, from what you unsay.
 
Blossoms, blossoms, blossoms along the road of your going to speak.
        Eighteenth century gardens, so sad in the middle of our drearning them now,
Are the way you are conscious of yourself on your eyelids, by your lips, through your cheek.
        A sick child sees the rain blur through the window of what you allow.
 
Do not footfall the silence that is the palace where our consciousness
        Is living at seeing gardens our duplicate lives of one soul.
What are we, in our dream of each other, but a picture which is
        The masterpiece of a painter that never painted at all?