JOHN GORHAM

"Tell me what you're doing over here, John Gorham,

 Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you're 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."­

"I'm over here to tell you what the moon already

May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago; 

I'm over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland,

 And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so."­

"Tell me what you're saying to me now, John Gorham,

Or you'll never see as much of me as ribbons any more; 

I'll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers,

 And you'H not follow far for one where flocks have been before."­

"I'm sorry now 'you never saw the flocks, Jane Wayland, 

But you're the one to make of them as many as you need. 

And then about the vanishing: It's I who mean to vanish;

 And when I'm here no longer you'll be done with me in­deed."­

"That's a way to tell me what 1 am, John Gorham!

How am 1 to know myself until 1 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."­

"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 ana lets him go and eats him up for fun."~

"Sure I never took you for a mouse, John Gorham;

All you say is easy, but so far from being true,

That 1 wish you wouldn't ever be again the one to think so;

 For it isn't cats and butterflies that 1 would be to you."­

"All your little animals are in one picture­

One I've had before me since a year ago tonight;

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." ­

"Won't you ever see me as 1 am, John Gorham,

Leaving out the foolishness and all 1 never meant? 

Somewhere in me there's a woman, if you know the way to find her.

Will you like me any better if 1 prove it and repent?"­

"I doubt if 1 shall ever have the time, Jane Wayland; 

And 1 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."