Lines for Edith Sitwell

THERE is midsummer
Opens all the windows
And drowns the houses
In scent of dust and rose.

Vibrant transparency above
The hills is visible.
At night the stars shine through the silence
Tangible, audible.

Clear day, you trail
Whispers of cherry and rambler.
Sun, you’ll gild the leaves to wraiths
Withered in amber.

Within our distraught gale of days
My secrecy listens
To a dynamo of summer that revolves
Generating what glistens.

Noon, the moon, straws of light,
The ringed pulsations on the lake,
Quietness folded on window sills,
The loads the reapers make.

Would I might be the bough which night
Dips in the dews! And wrung
From my impregnated phosphorescence
Honeyed leaf of my tongue.

But I am tied on strips of time,
Caged in minutes, made
By men, exiled from the day’s brilliance
In a deliberate shade.

My future seems of prison cells
Where each hour with a padlock waits,
Numbered, steeled, amongst my fellows
Behind the gnashing gates.

Only, some moment slips between the bars
Of the raging machines:
It gleams with eternal rumors
Of the high, midsummer scenes.

Man is that prison where his will
Has shut without pity
In a clock, eternity,
In his fist, rose of infinity.