Exorcism

Like ghosts returning stealthily From those grey lands Palled with funereal ashes falling After the burnt-out sunset, The mists of the valley reach with wavering, slow, Malignant arms from pine to pine, and climb the hill As fatal memories climb To assail some heart benighted and bewitched. . . . And once they would have crept Around me in resistless long beleaguerment, To lay their death-bleak fingers on my heart: But now My memories are of you and of the many graces And tender, immortal, mad beatitudes of love; And every chill and death-born phantom, Made harmless now and dim, Must pass to haunt the inane, unpassioned air; And only living ghosts Of raptures gone or ecstasies to be, May touch me and attain within the circle Your arms have set about me.