  To the Memory of Mary Pyne The flame of your red hair does crawl and creep Upon your body that denies the gloom And feeds upon your flesh as ’t would consume The cold precision of your austere sleep— And all night long I beat it back, and weep. It is not gentleness but mad despair That sets us kissing mouths, O Khalidine, Your mouth and mine, and one sweet mouth unseen We call our soul. Yet thick within our hair The dusty ashes that our days prepare. The dark comes up, my little love, and dyes Your fallen lids with stain of ebony, And draws a thread of fear ’tween you and me Pulling thin blindness down across our eyes— And far within the vale a lost bird cries. Like rats within an empty granary? The clapper lost, and long blown out to sea Your windy doves. And here the black bat cowers Against your clock that never strikes the hours. And now I say, has not the mountain’s base Here trembled long ago unto the cry “I love you, ah, I love you!” Now we die And lay, all silent, to the earth our face. Shall that cast out the echo of this place? Has not one in the dark funereal Heard foot-fall fearful, born of no man’s tread, And felt the wings of death, though no wing spread And on his cheek a tear, though no tear fell— And a voice saying without breath “Farewell!”
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