THE MARBLE CURTAINS

Not the true secrecies of cups or flowers,
soft arrowheads, or garden of the fox,
nor slender paths of silk to climb like lutes;
they are still yours; a dream to call them ours:
sightless the jewels, folded the pale flocks,
arcane the orchards and their guarded fruits.

Not the true secrecies.  But flesh and word
have borne a moth-call through the lilac air,
or ghost of wings, or grass-breath of a phrase
(conjectures of the tree-invisible bird)
naming by absence what is darkly there.
The nymph within the marble knew such ways:

imaging all no less denying all,
she was the mover of the shaping hand,
the life that waited on Pygmalion's lip.
Unreal till the useless fragments fall,
beauty is waiting to be sunlit, and
to ride your alabaster like a ship.