Woman

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Title:     Woman
Author: Eunice Tietjens [More Titles by Tietjens]

Strangely the sight of you moves me.
I have no standard by which to appraise you; the outer
    shell of you is all I know.
Yet irresistibly you draw me.
Your small plump body is closely clad in blue brocaded
    satin. The fit is scrupulous, yet no woman's figure
    is revealed. You are decorously shapeless.
Your satin trousers even are lined with fur.
Your hair is stiff and lustrous as polished ebony, bound
    at the neck in an adamantine knot, in which dull
    pearls are encrusted.
Your face is young and round and inscrutably alien.
Your complexion is exquisite, matte gold over-lying
    blush pink, textured like ripe fruit.
Your nose is flat, the perfect nose of China.
Your eyes--your eyes are witchery!
The blank curtain of your upper lid droops sharply on
    the iris, and when you smile the corners twinkle
    upward.
It is your eyes, I think, that move me.
They are so bright, so black!
They are alert and full of curiosity as the eyes of a
    squirrel, and like the eyes of a squirrel they have
    no depth behind them.
They are windows opening on a world as small as your
    bound feet, a world of ignorances, and vacuities,
    and kitchen-gods.
And yet your eyes are witchery. When you smile you
    are the woman-spirit, adorable.
I cannot appraise you, yet strangely the sight of you
    moves me.
I believe that I shall dream of you.
  Pa-tze-kiao

[The end]
Eunice Tietjens's poem: Woman

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