Explore "Rendezvous" by Edna St. Vincent Millay on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Not for these lovely blooms that prank your chambers did I come. Indeed, / I could have loved you better in the dark;
That is to say, in rooms less bright with roses, rooms more casual, less aware / Of History in the wings about to enter with benevolent air
On ponderous tiptoe, at the cue "Proceed."
Not that I like the ash-trays over-crowded and the place in a mess, / Or the monastic cubicle too unctuously austere and stark, / But partly that these formal garlands for our Eighth Street Aphrodite are a bit too Greek, / And partly that to make the poor walls rich with our unaided loveliness / Would have been more chic.
Yet here I am, having told you of my quarrel with the taxi-driver over a line of Milton, and you laugh; and you are you, none other.
Your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows.
But I am perverse: I wish you had not scrubbed-with pumice, I suppose- / The tobacco stains from your beautiful fingers. And I wish I did not feel like your mother.