The Secret Splendour

Dilemma

Often I strive to flee

The enrapturing tyranny

Of her truth-loveliness.

 For I who have lived a thrall

 To hours dark-shapen by distress,

How can I bear

Her being so divinely fair

That her whole body is a silver call

To share some golden vastitude of spirit-hush?

Yet every time I rush

Away from her to taste again

The bitter-sweetness of mortality,

The sweet 1 find a woeful memory

Of her white limb-accord, the bitter a sharp sense

Of all the incorruptible magnipotence

 I lose by leaving wantonly behind

The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind!

There is no flight for me,

Wherever now I turn 'tis she

Bewildering my life with glorious joy or pain.

Why have I cast impuissant eyes

 Upon a dazzling paradise

They neither can relinquish nor possess?

Why kept her spirit such creative calm

As fashioned so heart-widening a psalm

Of earth-insufferable loveliness?

...Is it because the human heart must break

With blind excess

 Of burning wonderment ere she can make

 Its little fearful bud assume

An infinite flowerage of flawless God-perfume?

14.9.33

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