The sense of contact!
Darkness lies between your fingers!
The cries of brazen instruments in a tempest!
The music of organs in the sunlight!
All the flocks of the soul in the depths of a night of eclipse!
All the salt of the sea on the grass of the meadows!
And the blaze of blue lightning on every horizon!
(Have pity on this human sense!)
But O these sadder, wearier contacts!
O the touch of your poor moist hands!
I hear your pure fingers as they glide between mine,
And flocks of lambs are departing by moonlight
Along the banks of a misty river.
I can remember all the hands that have touched my hands,
And again I see all that was protected by those hands,
And I see to-day what I was, protected by those cool hands.
I was often the beggar who gnaws his crust on the steps of a throne.
I was sometimes the diver, who no longer can evade the surging waters!
I was often a whole people no longer able to escape from the town!
And some hands were like a convent without a garden!
And some confined me like a group of invalids in a glass-house on a rainy day!
Until other cooler hands should come to set the doors ajar,
And sprinkle a little water upon the threshold!
O, I have known strange contacts,
And here they surround me forever!
Some were wont to give alms on a day of sunshine,
Some gathered a harvest in the depths of a cavern,
And the music of mountebanks was heard outside the prison.
There were wax-work figures in the summer woods,
And elsewhere the moon had swept the whole oasis,
And at times I found a virgin, flushed and sweating, in a grotto of ice!
Pity these strange hands!
These hands contain the secrets of all the kings!
Pity these hands too pale!
They seem to have emerged from the caverns of the moon!
They are worn with spinning threads from the distaffs of fountains!
Pity these hands, too white, too moist!
They are like princesses that slumber at noon all the summer through.
Avoid these hard, harsh hands!
They seem to have issued from the rocks!
But pity these cold hands!
I see a heart bleeding under ribs of ice!
And O, have pity on these evil hands,
For these have poisoned the springs!
They have set young cygnets in a nest of hemlock!
I have seen the angels of evil open the gates at noon!
Here are only madmen on a pestilent river!
Here are black sheep only in starless pastures!
And lambs hasting away to graze in darkness!
But O these cool faithful hands!
They come to offer ripe fruits to the dying!
They bring clear cold water in their palms!
They water the battlefields with milk!
They have surely come from wonderful and eternally virgin forests!