The Moonflower

The secret drops of love run through my mind:

Midnight is filled with sounds of the full sea

That has risen softly among the rocks;

Air stirs the cedar-tree.

Somewhere a fainting sweetness is distilled.

It is the moonflower hanging in its tent

Of twisted broad-leaved branches by the stony path

That squanders the cool scent.

Pallid, long as a lily, it swings a little

As if drunk with its own perfume and the night,

Which draws its perfume out and leaves the flower

The weaker for its flight.

Detached from my desires, in an oblivion

Of this world that surrounds me, in weariness

Of all but darkness, silence, starry solitude

I too feel that caress—

Delicate, serene and lonely, peaceful, strange

To the intellect and the imagination,

The touch with which reality wounds and ravishes

Our inmost desolation.

All being like the moonflower is dissatisfied

For the dark kiss that the night only gives,

And night gives only to the soul that waits in longing,

And in that only lives.