THE THREE WORMS
“Much have I looked upon—I, the now crawling, damp
and sightless evidence of her sight.
“Tam her eyes.
“Empires shone in me: suns set, moons arose, and were
drowned like lovely naiads in the waters of the sky. I knew
wild flowers so beautiful, that one dared not touch them lest
their beauty start to mere ugly life.
“T am that quiver of fragile and delicious expectation
that shone in the virgin eyes of her when .. . O happy
hour!
“Tam that greediness, that terrible woman’s greediness,
fierce as drought, relentless as Death, which devours its own
portion in the feast of life.
“ And I too, like her mouth, witness to it that she was
evil. The senses are the person in so much as they are the
sweet janitors to all that come and go. Through our five portals
life only flows, and the flavour of its tides is with us always.
I sit in judgment on myself—I where the world could gather
itself in one, little, humble, focus-point of curiosity and peep
into the garden of her soul—I—where seas could be held calm
and captive in a little pool of blue—I—who could consume
mountains in a flash, and devour the dawn, I who could bid
the moon trail her white limbs for my pleasure through the
windy bagnios of the sky.
“T sit in judgment and condemn, for often I was a sword
when Truth was a: little child, and the breasts of my beauty
I gave to Worthlessness in the stinking lupanars of Treachery
and Deceit.
“Brothers, like the afterlight of day, I the light of her
life consort with the shadows of evening, and I say it softly,
321