Sea garden / H. D. [electronic text]

THE GIFT

INSTEAD of pearls—a wrought clasp— a bracelet—will you accept this?

You know the script— you will start, wonder: what is left, what phrase after last night? This:

The world is yet unspoiled for you, you wait, expectant— you are like the children who haunt your own steps for chance bits—a comb that may have slipped, a gold tassle, unravelled, plucked from your scarf, twirled by your slight fingers into the street— a flower dropped.

Do not think me unaware, I who have snatched at you as the street-child clutched at the seed-pearls you spilt that hot day when your necklace snapped.

Do not dream that I speak as one defrauded of delight, sick, shaken by each heart-beat or paralyzed, stretched at length, who gasps: these ripe pears

are bitter to the taste, this spiced wine, poison, corrupt. I cannot walk— who would walk? Life is a scavanger's pit—I escape— I only, rejecting it, lying here on this couch.

Your garden sloped to the beach, myrtle overran the paths, honey and amber flecked each leaf, the citron-lily head— one among many— weighed there, over-sweet.

The myrrh-hyacinth spread across low slopes, violets streaked black ridges through the grass.

The house, too, was like this, over painted, over lovely— the world is like this.

Sleepless nights, I remember the initiates, their gesture, their calm glance. I have heard how in rapt thought, in vision, they speak with another race, more beautiful, more intense than this. I could laugh— more beautiful, more intense?

Perhaps that other life is contrast always to this. I reason: I have lived as they

in their inmost rites— they endure the tense nerves through the moment of ritual. I endure from moment to moment— days pass all alike, tortured, intense.

This I forgot last night: you must not be blamed, it is not your fault; as a child, a flower—any flower tore my breast— meadow-chickory, a common grass-tip, a leaf shadow, a flower tint unexpected on a winter-branch.

I reason: another life holds what this lacks, a sea, unmoving, quiet— not forcing our strength to rise to it, beat on beat— a stretch of sand, no garden beyond, strangling with its myrrh-lilies— a hill, not set with black violets but stones, stones, bare rocks, dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty to distract—to crowd madness upon madness.

Only a still place and perhaps some outer horror some hideousness to stamp beauty, a mark—no changing it now— on our hearts.

I send no string of pearls, no bracelet—accept this.