Xury

He waited for her by day,
To seek the truth
Of her fame;
But the light of sun
On the dazzling spears
Burnt her form
Into a dark mote
On the eye of day.

He waited by evening,
Near the black crescented tankern
Until the last water maid
Had talked and went her way.
She came to fill,
In dark solitude,
The tall amphora;
But veiled she was,
And her face told him nothing:
Veiled in silk and in twilight,
Veiled in secrecy and in fear;
While a false light from the tower
Showed a burnished shield
In the cypress garden.

He offered a rose,
More scented than seen;
And the hand on the blossom
Was drawn in the pool
Like two white doves,
Nestling and cool;
And in her delight,
She leaned o'er the well;
And the veil soon weighed
With the dew of the night,
And fell from her eyes,
And in the haze of torches
From the castle wall--
He saw that they shone with love.

All black was the cypress garden,
And the burnished shield
Was a moon at the end of the well,
The milky clouds that passed before
Were two white mares to bear her away,
Over a desert road,
That wound and lost itself
In a trackless waste;
And romance, like the shifting dunes
Moved by the sirocco,
Soon banished all pursuit
And resemblance of yesterday.