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I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear.....
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring comes north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

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AMY LOWELL

THE GARDEN BY MOONLIGHT

A black cat among roses,

Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,

The sweet scents of heliotrope and night-scented stock.

The garden is very still,

It is dazed with moonlight,

Contented with perfume,

Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.

Firefly lights open and vanish

High as the tipbuds of the golden glow,

Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,

Moon-spikes shafting through the snow-ball hush.

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Only the little faces of the ladies' delight are alert

and staring,

Only the cat, padding between the roses,

Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern 5 As water is shaken by the falling of a leaf.

Then you come.

And you are quiet like the garden,

And white like the alyssum flowers,

And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies. 10 Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies? They knew my mother,

But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.

CARL SANDBURG

15 THREE PIECES ON THE SMOKE OF AUTUMN

Smoke of autumn is on it all.

The streamers loosen and travel.

The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,

20 They make a long-tailed rider

In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.

Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol 25 routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce 5 the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I.W.W. man in Vladivostock.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red 10 ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.

Better the blue silence and the gray west,

The autumn mist on the river,

And not any hate and not any love,

And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels

And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark.

Here a dog head dreams.

Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brothers of dusk and umber.

15

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