Hetärengräber

In their long hair they lie

with brown faces gone deep into themselves.

Their eyes shut as if against too much distance.

Skeletons, mouths, flowers. In the mouths

the smooth teeth like a traveller's chess set

of ivory, set up in rows.

And flowers, yellow pearls, slender bones,

hands and shirts, withering fabrics

over the collapsed heart. But

there beneath those rings, talismans

and eye-blue stones (favourite keepsakes)

there still stands the silent crypt of the sex,

filled to its vault with flower-petals.

And again yellow pearls, rolled far apart,—

bowls of fired clay, whose curving side

their own likeness has adorned, green shards

of ointment-jars that smell like flowers,

and figures of little gods: household altars,

a hetaera-heaven with delighted gods.

burst girdles, flat scarabs,

small figures of giant sex,

a mouth that laughs, and dancers and runners,

golden brooches, like small bows

for the hunt of animal- and bird-amulets,

and long pins, dainty household ware

and a round shard of red ground,

on it, like the black inscription of a doorway,

the taut legs of a four-horse team.

And again flowers, pearls that have rolled away,

the bright flanks of a small lyre,

and amid veils that fall like mists,

as if crept out of the shoe's chrysalis:

the ankle's light butterfly.

with precious things, stones, toys, household goods,

with smashed trinkets (all that fell down into them),

and they grow dark like the bed of a river.

over which, in short swift waves

(that wanted onward to the next life)

the bodies of many youths hurled themselves

and in which the streams of men rushed.

And sometimes boys broke from the mountains

of childhood, came down with timid fall

and played with the things on the river-floor,

until the gradient seized their feeling:

the whole width of this wide way

and drove eddies at the deep places;

and for the first time mirrored the banks

and distant bird-calls, while high above

the starry nights of a sweet land

grew into skies that nowhere closed.