The bright winds answer; the clouds rise
White from the grave, shaking their head,
Strewing the grave-clothes through the skies,
In languid drifting shadow shed
Upon the fields where, slowly spread,
      Each shadow dies.

In every wood is green and gold,
The unbridged river runs all green
With queenly swan-clouds floating bold
Down to the mill’s swift guillotine. 
Beyond the mill each murdered queen
      Floats white and cold.

—­If I could rise up in a cloud
And look down on the new earth in flight,
Shadow-like cast my thought’s thin shroud
Back upon these fields of light;
And hear the winds of day and night
      Meet, singing loud!

THE WANDERER

Over the pool of sleep
The night mists creep,
Then faint thin light and then clear day,
Noontide, and lingering afternoon;
Then that Wanderer, the Moon
Wandering her old wild way.

How many spirits follow
Her in that dark hollow! 
Like a lost lamb she roams on high
Through the cold and soundless sky,
And stares down into her deep
Reflection in the pool of sleep.

How many follow
Her in that lone hollow! 
She sees them not nor would she hear
Though both shape and sound were clear,
But stares, stares into the pool
Of her fear and beauty full.

Far in strange gay skies
She pales and dies,
Forgetting that bright transitory
Reflection of astonished glory,
Nor heeds the spirits that follow
Her into day’s bright hollow.

MERRILL’S GARDEN

There is a garden where the seeded stems of thin long grass are bowed
Beneath July’s slow rains and heat and tired children’s trailing feet;
And the trees’ neglected branches droop and make a cloud beneath the cloud,
And in that dark the crimson dew of raspberries shines more sweet than
    sweet.

The flower of the tall acacia’s gone, the acacia’s flower is white no more,
The aspen lifts his pithless arms, the aspen leaves are close and still;
The wind that tossed the clouds along, gray clouds and white like feathers
    bore,
Lets even a feather faintly fall and smoke spread hugely where it will.

But though the acacia’s flower is gone and raspberries bear bright fruit
    untasted,
Beauty lives there, oh rich and rare, past the sum of eager June. 
The lime tree’s pyramid of flower and leaf and yellow flower unwasted
Rises at eve and bars the breast wild-heaving of the timid moon.

Now the tall pear-trees unrebuked lift their green fingers to the sky;
Their lower boughs are crossed like arms of templars in long stony sleep. 
Their arms are crossed as though the wind, returning from wild war on high,
Had touched them with an angry breath, or whispered from his cavern deep.