Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

In the Desert

Alice Corbin

I HAVE seen you, O king of the dead,

More beautiful than sunlight.

Your kiss is like quicksilver;

But I turned my face aside

Lest you should touch my lips.

In the field with the flowers

You stood darkly.

My knees trembled, and I knew

That no other joy would be like this.

But the warm field, and the sunlight,

And the few years of my girlhood

Came before me, and I cried,

Not yet!

Not yet, O dark lover!

You were patient.

—I know you will come again.

I have seen you, O king of the dead,

More beautiful than sunlight.

Here in the desert, under the cottonwoods

That keep up a monotonous wind-murmur of leaves,

I can hear the water dripping

Through the canals in Venice

From the oar of the gondola

Hugging the old palaces,

Beautiful old houses

Sinking quietly into decay…..

O sunlight—how many things you gild

With your eternal gold!

Sunlight—and night—are everlasting.

Once every twenty-four hours

Earth has a moment of indecision:

Shall I go on?—

Shall I keep turning?—

Is it worth while?

Everything holds its breath.

The trees huddle anxiously

On the edge of the arroyo,

And then, with a tremendous heave,

Earth shoves the hours on towards dawn.

Four o’clock in the afternoon.

A stream of money is flowing down Fifth Avenue.

They speak of the fascination of New York

Climbing aboard motor-busses to look down on the endless play

From the Bay to the Bronx.

But it is forever the same:

There is no life there.

Watching a cloud on the desert,

Endlessly watching small insects crawling in and out of the shadow of a cactus,

A herd-boy on the horizon driving goats,

Uninterrupted sky and blown sand:

Space—volume—silence—

Nothing but life on the desert,

Intense life.

The hill cedars and piñons

Point upward like flames,

Like smoke they are drawn upward

From the face of the mountains.

Over the sunbaked slopes,

Patches of sun-dried adobes straggle;

Willows along the acequias in the valley

Give cool streams of green;

Beyond, on the bare hillsides,

Yellow and red gashes and bleached white paths

Give foothold to the burros,

To the black-shawled Mexican girls

Who go for water.