The Imagined One

Light on the mind is the awareness of you,
Peerless among all others of the world, your eyes;
Tender the lips, whose mercies are (as scavengers of souls might be)
One man's vision of eternity:
Pristine, dewlike globes, sparkling starlike and ablaze,
They frickle down into and grapple up the name of me
(Which I alone once knew, deep within the inside only),
To unspell there its noble characters, amid the sacredest of solitudes,
Fling them out—stringingly you do, the soul of me—languidly,
To grace upon your neck like letters from some distant planet's alphabet
In words I should not recognize and then, as cauldrons do,
Transform the beast from flesh to food and fix the feast for finishing.


by Robert Hampton Burt
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