The bird's nest, empty, on her table, feeds her, 
Far from a Chinese chowder of gummy nests. 
She has so small a body, she finds a feast 
In a slenderer soup, or in its fragrances. 
Someone absconded with her childhood; early 
She learned to wipe the fingers of her mind 
Like the Prioress at meat. But a tiger paces 
Her nights. In the grassy morning she chases the cat 
From a wee bit rabbit, it limps off, she is bleeding. 
And mends her wounds, and would admire the tiger 
For its barbarous grace. She keeps a map of the tropics 
A puritan ancestress left, and her garnet from Etna, 
Entertaining eternity with a scrap of chill fire. 
It is Sunday; the chromium twinkles ironically 
In the room, while her love moves round a ghostly branch 
That beckons backward, the torn wood gesturing still: 
A wave, arrested. For the girl remembers 
Years when the dry past was her dancing partner; 
The stalk, the straw, the rain of Hokusai 
She salutes: in field or sky, whatever is drily smiling. 
But the deserts do not tempt: a single sand 
Is her sufficient Sphinx. And she may hear it 
Sing, she thinks, as the sun, rising, strikes. 
But now she is moving into a nearer music, 
That visits her pillow at midnight, after the padding 
Of the tiger goes off, and the terror, although she knows 
Fear of a sort, as she listens. And the night is soft. 
She trembles, remembering as she forgets, asking 
If the voice in her veins dissembles. It is sweet 
As before, rough as never before. She hears famished crying, 
Yet under and over it, wordless, like the world, 
A song that is too human for a bird.