| |
| TELL me what you’re doing over here, John Gorham— | |
| Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you’re not. | |
| Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlight | |
| Are a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot.” | |
| |
| “I’m over here to tell you what the moon already | 5 |
| May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago; | |
| I’m over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland, | |
| And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so.” | |
| |
| “Tell me what you’re saying to me now, John Gorham, | |
| Or you’ll never see as much of me as ribbons any more; | 10 |
| I’ll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers, | |
| And you’ll not follow far for one where flocks have been before.” | |
| |
| “I’m sorry now you never saw the flocks, Jane Wayland; | |
| But you’re the one to make of them as many as you need. | |
| And then about the vanishing: it’s I who mean to vanish; | 15 |
| And when I’m here no longer you’ll be done with me indeed.” | |
| |
| “That’s a way to tell me what I am, John Gorham! | |
| How am I to know myself until I make you smile? | |
| Try to look as if the moon were making faces at you, | |
| And a little more as if you meant to stay a little while.” | 20 |
| |
| “You are what it is that over rose-blown gardens | |
| Makes a pretty flutter for a season in the sun. | |
| You are what it is that with a mouse, Jane Wayland, | |
| Catches him and let’s him go and eats him up for fun.” | |
| |
| “Sure I never took you for a mouse, John Gorham. | 25 |
| All you say is easy, but so far from being true | |
| That I wish you wouldn’t ever be again the one to think so; | |
| For it isn’t cats and butterflies that I would be to you.” | |
| |
| “All your little animals are in one picture— | |
| One I’ve had before me since a year ago to-night; | 30 |
| And the picture where they live will be of you, Jane Wayland, | |
| Till you find a way to kill them or to keep them out of sight.” | |
| |
| “Won’t you ever see me as I am, John Gorham, | |
| Leaving out the foolishness and all I never meant? | |
| Somewhere in me there’s a woman, if you know the way to find her— | 35 |
| Will you like me any better if I prove it and repent?” | |
| |
| “I doubt if I shall ever have the time, Jane Wayland; | |
| And I dare say all this moonlight lying round us might as well | |
| Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns that are forgotten, | |
| As on two that have no longer much of anything to tell.” | 40 |
| |
