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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Alice Corbin

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

In the Desert

Alice Corbin

I
I HAVE seen you, O king of the dead,

More beautiful than sunlight.

Your kiss is like quicksilver;

But I turned my face aside

Lest you should touch my lips.

In the field with the flowers

You stood darkly.

My knees trembled, and I knew

That no other joy would be like this.

But the warm field, and the sunlight,

And the few years of my girlhood

Came before me, and I cried,

Not yet!

Not yet, O dark lover!

You were patient.

—I know you will come again.

I have seen you, O king of the dead,

More beautiful than sunlight.

II
Here in the desert, under the cottonwoods

That keep up a monotonous wind-murmur of leaves,

I can hear the water dripping

Through the canals in Venice

From the oar of the gondola

Hugging the old palaces,

Beautiful old houses

Sinking quietly into decay…..

O sunlight—how many things you gild

With your eternal gold!

Sunlight—and night—are everlasting.

III
Once every twenty-four hours

Earth has a moment of indecision:

Shall I go on?

Shall I keep turning?

Is it worth while?

Everything holds its breath.

The trees huddle anxiously

On the edge of the arroyo,

And then, with a tremendous heave,

Earth shoves the hours on towards dawn.

IV
Four o’clock in the afternoon.

A stream of money is flowing down Fifth Avenue.

They speak of the fascination of New York

Climbing aboard motor-busses to look down on the endless play

From the Bay to the Bronx.

But it is forever the same:

There is no life there.

Watching a cloud on the desert,

Endlessly watching small insects crawling in and out of the shadow of a cactus,

A herd-boy on the horizon driving goats,

Uninterrupted sky and blown sand:

Space—volume—silence—

Nothing but life on the desert,

Intense life.

V
The hill cedars and piñons

Point upward like flames,

Like smoke they are drawn upward

From the face of the mountains.

Over the sunbaked slopes,

Patches of sun-dried adobes straggle;

Willows along the acequias in the valley

Give cool streams of green;

Beyond, on the bare hillsides,

Yellow and red gashes and bleached white paths

Give foothold to the burros,

To the black-shawled Mexican girls

Who go for water.