Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/72

 winged Bird. I know it. I know the values of my life and of me. I do not mistake tapers for torches, ducats for louis d'ors, vicarious nepenthe for dreamless death.

In dusk-moments my bone-and-flesh is all of me I'm sure of. It begins and ends in this earth. It answers the violent summonses of this earth and its dusks.

In the just-gone dusk I felt the prickling blood flow to my finger-ends. A flood-tide, blinding red, surged and seethed and bubbled and pounded at my heart.

'I want a Lover—some Lover'—I murmured to the shadows beyond my window.

I grew breathless.

The spirit of my flesh rose like a wind-blown flame.

A loud cry rang in my nerve-wilderness.

That moment the variant analysis which always rides with me stopped dead.

There came instead sheer feeling—the merciless beauty.

—a man-person, maybe—the man of happy unanalytic brutality—to be suddenly there with me: to flash into my shadowy solitude like a lightning bolt and burst and break me.

—a quarter-hour of exquisite wildness—restlessness, made of Star-flame and Lily-petal and Cloud-burst