Lo! I touch you.

Softly yearningly I touch you, and pass on—dreaming the dream of the soul’s slow disentanglement.

* * * * *

Sharp-cut, thin-lipped, sad, scholastic; plain-featured, unembarrassed, affectionate; and you, beautiful careless boy! and you, strange eternal anxious mother-face!

* * * * *

How shall I say what I have to say? How shall I speak the word which sums up all words that are spoken? How shall I speak that for which the moon and the stars and running waters and the universe itself subsist, to speak it?—which if it could be uttered in a word there were no need of all these things.

* * * * *

O Death, take me away.

Take me away, kindly Death; lead me forth, lead me through the entire universe.

Let me pass; hold me back, I say, no longer; for I am tired, I am sick, of talking—and I forebode other ways.

* * * * *

For I would be the dust;

And I would be the silver rays of the moon and the stars, and the washing sound of the midnight sea;

And nourishing sweet air and running water, for the lips of them that I choose;

To pass, to put on the invisible cap, to run round about the world, unseen.

And I will be the plain ungarnished facts of life, with continual nearnesses;

The train arriving at the station shall not be nearer or more solid; nor the lifting and transporting of boxes and goods, nor the grasp of the handles to them that open and shut the doors.

I will be the ground underfoot and the common clay;

The ploughman shall turn me up with his ploughshare among the roots of the twitch in the sweet-smelling furrow;

The potter shall mould me, running his finger along my whirling edge (we will be faithful to one another, he and I);

The bricklayer shall lay me: he shall tap me into place with the handle of his trowel;

And to him I will utter the word which with my lips I have not spoken.