Dreams

How vain your illusion still, O dreams —
spread your promises over me,
soothe my arms; I embrace phantoms
no arms have ever wrapped around me.

***

You come with the first dream of my night,
shimmering in the garment of temptation,
and from between my hands the morning
snatches her away, and you are gone,
leaving on my lips the trace of kisses
with the fire of thirst in them —
no softness of cheeks, no perfume of longings,
no lips to quench it.

***

Shake off her phantom and wake, you who have gone adrift,
O harvester of the fragrant fields —
the vineyard is calling you, and the threshing floor,
and the wheat-ears bound in sheaves.

***

And I? Oh, who could put you far from me?
I would go out in your night,
as if you were an angel come to me from heaven
and I a hermit at prayer before you.
O you who are cold in love, you cannot
meet the sun and the fire,
nor has the sweet one's wound, in your nights,
carved out a thousand keepsakes,
that you might call your heart a blaze and embers —
no, no: it has no blaze,
nor is there in your eye the flare of the hearth,
only the glimmer of a moon on snow.

***

Enough, enough — I dreamed of you a lifetime,
and the dream made me forget
the delight of the quarter's girls, fair and dark.
Go your way — the world is full for me.

***

I open my arms to a thousand breasts and one,
gulping down, at life's dusk, its drunkenness,
till my heart goes out like some river
the desert is drinking dry...