Waikiki

Warm perfumes like a breath from vine and treeDrift down the darkness. Plangent, hidden from eyes,Somewhere an eukaleli thrills and criesAnd stabs with pain the night's brown savagery.And dark scents whisper; and dim waves creep to me,Gleam like a woman's hair, stretch out, and rise;And new stars burn into the ancient skies,Over the murmurous soft Hawaian sea.

And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again,And still remember, a tale I have heard, or known,An empty tale, of idleness and pain,Of two that loved—or did not love—and oneWhose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly,A long while since, and by some other sea.

Waikiki, 1913

In the grey tumult of these after yearsOft silence falls; the incessant wranglers part;And less-than-echoes of remembered tearsHush all the loud confusion of the heart;And a shade, through the toss'd ranks of mirth and cryingHungers, and pains, and each dull passionate mood,—Quite lost, and all but all forgot, undying,Comes back the ecstasy of your quietude.

So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams,Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men,Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible,And light on waving grass, he knows not when,And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell.

The Pacific, 1914