THE THREE WORMS
citadel of her heart, which like a faded and extinguished censer,
rusts in the decadence of its scented memories.
The three worms dispose themselves and begin to talk.
The little worm which is issuing from her mouth begins:
“Tam her mouth, her beautiful mouth, that sweet frail
chalice where her soul delighted to dissolve itself and to lie.
That mouth of hers, so nervous, so intimately sensible, that it
is pleasant to think of it as the fragile rim of the holy and
wonderful amphora of her strange exultant being.
“TI am—since I was fed on them—all that litany of kisses
which passion flung like a storm of wet rose-leaves on to her
mouth—am, am I not?—all those dreams and pale blue shim-
mering fantasies that love drew like mists out of the hearts of
all her lovers to expire in the stained fervour of an instant’s
rapture.
“TI am—forgive it to me!—all the lies which floated from
her lips as sweetly as caresses, all those lies which fled like
arrows barbed with gall into the ravished brains of her
adorers. One I sent to America, and another to pick out the
green glint of Death’s eye in the lustre of a glass of poison. I
tore husband from wife with my wingéd scented words, redo-
lent of the very nudity and flesh of love, yellow, crocus-tinted,
opalescent, murderously sweet.
“T pricked the souls of little children with the crystal toys
of speech that fell from the melting coral of my curved lips.
“Twas East and West, and North and South, and sun and
moon, and shuddering flight of stars to more than one, and it
seems to me, as one of her heirs and sons, that she was not a
good woman.
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