Marsden Hartley

From “Kaleidoscope”

MARIE LAURENCIN!—

How she likened them to young gazelles

Disporting in a quiet glade, with their thin legs

And their large wondering eyes,

Full of delicate trembling—shy, tender, suspecting,

Furtively watching for the stranger in the wood.

L’éventail exquis! la main d’ivoire!

Les yeux de gazelles!—glimmering, provocative

Magic tumbling out of them like bronzed hoops

Or circled ropes to dance with like gilded wire.

The hand touches a frail cheek, and faints

In its cushioned depths with the excess

Of its palloring fragility.

Light zephyrs hover over the edges of frail lace,

And roll from off dark coils of ribboned hair—

Great bird-swings poised at the nape of the childish neck

Setting out the white throat from the blue or rose shadow—

Blue, and a far cerise, with a gentle dove-like grey

Encircling them, covering them with mists of timidity.

Speak they in concert of a little girl’s morning,

As she steps frailly out of the linen and the lace

That folded her young virgin limbs from the terrors

Of the monstrous undivulging night:

Stepping out upon the edges of a world too bright

With glinting facets of a diamonded despair,

Into the busy bustling world of young gazelles,

With their long thin legs tripping noiselessly;

Into the thronging glade of girlish hopes and fears,

In a harsh world where the folding and the unfolding

Of tenderly sequined fans makes a living music

For their anguished eye and ear,

And a wall to keep the beasty wolves from their fingertips,

And the tongues of hummingbirds distantly

From their young and frightened throats.

I hear the hearts of little girls beating

Against the hearts of the young gazelles!

It makes a white commotion in forests of thick pearl;

And their young white fingers waver as would

Young jasmine buds on the fallen embers of the breeze.