THE EQUINOX
the sweet process of life is at work in every cell and particle of
the dead. Truly, there is no such thing as death. Lips grown
tired of speech, and outhonied of the honey of all kisses fade
and whisper away into something else. The crude utterances
of human language fail them, and they win instead the subtle
perfumed conversation of flowers and vegetation. Thus their
dust comes to lie about a rose-root, and with the lovely
chemistry of earth they tremble back to the surface once more
as crinkled and crimson perfume, or a frail flutter of yellow
longing. Like flags, like tender waving pennons or messengers
of hope and greeting from those beleaguered ones dissolving
in the fastnesses of earth.
Every rose, every lily is a message from our dead: a sigh
or a smile: something simple like the daisy from a simple
heart, something of weird and oppressive beauty from some
poet’s brain, like the passion flower or the fuchsia.
In the coffin of the beautiful dead woman, there are three
worms, sweet, clean, wavy, little maggots that will one day
carry all the charm and delight of the dead back into the
world again, will quicken and nourish seeds and roots, so that
in the pink glamour of an April almond tree, the glory of the
dead woman’s hair shall be returned again.
One of these creatures is poised over her mouth, which
again, to vulgar and unseeing eyes, looks ugly, though it is
really more beautiful now than ever it was, for it is quick with
frail seeds of countless existences, and is become a very factory
and warehouse of Life Itself.
Another worm is coming out of the dead right eye of the
woman, coined, as it were, like a little pink amethyst from the
stuff of her brain. And yet another peers from the mysterious
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