Bast
She had green eyes, that excellent seer,
And little peaks to either ear.
She sat there, and I sat here.
She spoke of Egypt, and a white
Temple, against enormous night.
She smiled with clicking teeth and said
That the dead were never dead;
Said old emperors hang like bats
In barns at night, or ran like rats-
But empresses came back as cats!
All glances that upon her fall she keeps
within herself, to hide thus and to hold,
over them threatening, annoyed at last,
shivering-and then-and then she sleeps.
But turning suddenly as if awaked,
her face directly fronts upon your own:
and there you meet your own glance in the gold
amber of her widened round eye-stone
unexpectedly again: enclosed, held fast,
like an insect long ago extinct.
~Rainer Maria Rilke...from Black Cat.
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