Plump from Camembert and Clicquot, eyelids
Thin as skins of onions, cut like dough 'round the eyes.
Such was your look in a photograph I saw
In a silver frame on a woman's dresser—and such
Your look in life, you thing of flesh alone!
And then,
As a soul looks down on the body it leaves—
A body by fever slain—I look on myself
As I was a decade ago, while the letter is read:
I enter a box
Of a theatre with Jim, my friend of fifty,
I being twenty-two. Two women are in the box,
One of an age for Jim and one of an age for me.
And mine is dressed in a dainty gown of dimity,
And she fans herself with a fan of silver spangles,
Till a subtle odor of delicate powder or of herself
Enters my blood, and I stare at her snowy neck,
And the glossy brownness of her hair until
She feels my stare and turns half-view and I see
How like a Greek's is her nose, with just a little
Aquiline touch and I catch the flash of an eye,
And the glint of a smile on the richness of her lips.
The company now discourses upon the letter
But my dream goes on:
I re-live a rapture
Which may be madness, and no man understands
Until he feels it no more. The youth that was I
[61]
