Poems (Forrest)/The ghost

THE GHOST

If I were a ghost I could find you out:
So I kept the face and the form you praise,
And the gold hair ringing my head about,
Just as in earth-bound days.

I would tap with my finger at your door—
Scandal, of course, would not matter then—
No tiptoe, trembling as once before,
So afraid of the tongues of men.

But delicate rapping from post to post,
Even the panels I could slip through.
Who is going to gossip about a ghost
That comes at midnight to talk with you?

Ghosts know so much. Death has taught them this:
They have drunk of an all-revealing draught,
When we refuse you our lips to kiss,
Some other woman has turned, and laughed.

But suppose, at a midnight, clear and fine,
Roses heavy and chill with dew,
I should draw your dreaming mouth to mine
And wander over the world with you.

By the way of the station garden,
Hayricks tented against the shed,
One cypress pine like a stately warden
Of moonlit waters and dreamings dead

Rises to climb where the dark firs straggle;
Moonlight ripples beneath a bridge,
Sandy slopes where the grasses haggle
With pumpkin vines for the sheltered ridge.

The shepherd's hut with the dun bark sagging,
The crooked chimney, the broken bail
Made wind-proof with a scrap of bagging
Kept in place by a rusty nail.

Till we came to the plain that has no ending
(So it seems when the moon is high),
To where the Dalby myalls bending
Write their twilight along the sky.

Ghosts of moons, all a ghost-world flooding,
Sifted down from a sieve of blue:
Wattle grey in its pallid budding,
Ghosts of perfumes trickling through.

If I were a ghost I would seek you out,
Take the trail that we loved the most—
The world and its carping tongues to flout,
For who could gossip about a ghost?