Page:John Brown's body by Stephen Vincent Benét.djvu/15

 These were your lovers in your buckskin-youth.

And each one married with a dream so proud

He never knew it could not be the truth

And that he coupled with a girl of cloud.

And now to see you is more difficult yet

Except as an immensity of wheel

Made up of wheels, oiled with inhuman sweat

And glittering with the heat of ladled steel.

All these you are, and each is partly you,

And none is false, and none is wholly true.

So how to see you as you really are,

So how to suck the pure, distillate, stored

Essence of essence from the hidden star

And make it pierce like a riposting sword.

For, as we hunt you down, you must escape

And we pursue a shadow of our own

That can be caught in a magician's cape

But has the flatness of a painted stone.

Never the running stag, the gull at wing,

The pure elixir, the American thing.

And yet, at moments when the mind was hot

With something fierier than joy or grief,

When each known spot was an eternal spot

And every leaf was an immortal leaf,

I think that I have seen you, not as one,

But clad in diverse semblances and powers,

Always the same, as light falls from the sun,

And always different, as the differing hours.

Yet, through each altered garment that you wore,

The naked body, shaking the heart's core.