The Equinox (Volume I, Number III)

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 318