SUNBATHER

Her body moves to its design,
and the instinctive dreams begin,
the child of woollen toys and wax
discovering consciousness and sex,
desire of colours and of sweets
dazzled by new and drenching lights.
The childish laws, the remote world
still half a womb, are now concealed
under the woman's thickening mist
about her; willow-pattern past
out-painted by a You-and-Me
and the memory of a Tree.

Already there is motherhood
in the hips or bending head;
a writhing mistress in her thighs
plucks innocence from hands and eyes.
For a double flower has burst
from the blunt unmoving breast,
and mysteries begin to dwell
in the newly-murmuring shell.
While the strange locks and windows make
the world romantic for her sake,
unrealized by thought and limb
her power and her anguish come.

The crooked X by which we met
and are again made separate
- atrocious alexandrine years
- has plunged us too among the tears,
learning to howl within ourself
for love's hereditary wolf.
But we have pity left, perhaps,
for the child before she weeps:
our first adulthood was a thing
of hesitance from nursery-song
- her trembling poise, her growing-full
- an adolescent by a pool.
				MA'ADI.