Anthology of Massachusetts Poets

<h2><SPAN name="chap57"></SPAN>A BATHER</h2> <p class="poem"> Thick dappled by circles of sunshine and fluttering shade.<br/> Your bright, naked body advances, blown over by leaves,<br/> Half-quenched in their various green, just a point of you showing,<br/> A knee or a thigh, sudden glimpsed, then at once blotted into<br/> The filmy and flickering forest, to start out again<br/> Triumphant in smooth, supple roundness, edged sharp as white ivory,<br/> Cool, perfect, with rose rarely tinting your lips and your breasts,<br/> Swelling out from the green in the opulent curves of ripe fruit,<br/> And hidden, like fruit, by the swift intermittence of leaves.<br/> So, clinging to branches and moss, you advance on the ledges<br/> Of rock which hang over the stream, with the wood-smells about you,<br/> The pungence of strawberry plants and of gum-oozing spruces,<br/> While below runs the water impatient, impatient to take you,<br/> To splash you, to run down your sides, to sing you of deepness,<br/> Of pools brown and golden, with brown-and-gold flags on their borders,<br/> Of blue, lingering skies floating solemnly over your beauty,<br/> Of undulant waters a-sway in the effort to hold you<br/> To keep you submerged and quiescent while over you glories<br/> The summer.<br/> Oread, Dryad, or Naiad, or just<br/> Woman, clad only in youth and in gallant perfection,<br/> Standing up in a great burst of sunshine, you dazzle my eyes<br/> Like a snow-star, a moon, your effulgence burns up in a halo,<br/> For you are the chalice which holds all the races of men.<br/> You slip into the pool and the water folds over your shoulder,<br/> And over the tree-tops the clouds slowly follow<br/> your swimming, To behold the way they act.<br/> And the scent of the woods is sweet on this hot summer morning.<br/></p> <p class="left"> AMY LOWELL</p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />