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TELL me what youre doing over here, John Gorham | |
Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when youre 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. | |
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Im over here to tell you what the moon already | 5 |
May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago; | |
Im over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland, | |
And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so. | |
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Tell me what youre saying to me now, John Gorham, | |
Or youll never see as much of me as ribbons any more; | 10 |
Ill vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers, | |
And youll not follow far for one where flocks have been before. | |
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Im sorry now you never saw the flocks, Jane Wayland; | |
But youre the one to make of them as many as you need. | |
And then about the vanishing: its I who mean to vanish; | 15 |
And when Im here no longer youll be done with me indeed. | |
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Thats 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 |
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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 lets him go and eats him up for fun. | |
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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 wouldnt ever be again the one to think so; | |
For it isnt cats and butterflies that I would be to you. | |
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All your little animals are in one picture | |
One Ive 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. | |
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Wont you ever see me as I am, John Gorham, | |
Leaving out the foolishness and all I never meant? | |
Somewhere in me theres a woman, if you know the way to find her | 35 |
Will you like me any better if I prove it and repent? | |
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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 |
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