The Lake

Lady, your winters of snowflakes are chilling. Rain-seconds tick on your face; too late! You are making the many none Dissembler, dissolver, leveller. Moon is a reckless bather, Dipping his toe on your elegant Japanese plate– A buttercup-olive Mandarin, Glazed on blue-boned china. That salt-shake-sprinkle of stars, Those ripe-red poppy suns, Smalled, in your shrinking retina You drank them down and in, all gone, all gone. The incautious river, A slant-eyed junkman from Old Siam, Lowers his sails in the iceberg of your calm– Lake, how like a woman you are! How still, how slow, how graspless as a shadow, Sheer as kimono silk. A swanlit Ophelia pillow, Your midnight milk Could fit me, snug as a moleskin pelt Of velvety, velvety brown... Rockabye water of treacherous eiderdown. Black lotus, your honey is venomous. Oh most exquisite foe, How full I divine each gleam, Knowing each window-veil Clasps in its rotten seam Lost stars, a silt of sequins. Lady, lady, the busy, unstiching pike Will pick and pick them clean.