Body’s Blood

And if I love you more than my own soul
Then must you die and I shall never die
Until I reach you, who have loved you so
That life and death are little more than dreams
And night-vigils and visitings from God.
You loved me, lied to me, left me. What's a bride
That ought to have been brideless? For you were
A girl that never should have married; one
So much more wonderful than I imagined
Anyone could be; made of no virgin soil,
But veritable virgin when I met you,
Before I made you woman. And that's over,
As all such things have always been and shall be
In this world and the next. You know I might
Just: chance to meet you, at some street-corner
Under the glaring lights, in Leicester Square,
Where you and I came out of the Empire. There
How well we know the stage-door, you and I,
And how you changed your houses; Howland Street,
Where Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud lived
Some storm-tossed years of intense passion and pain
And love and hatred. There I hated you
And there I loved you, if Verlaine had met you
What songs he would have written!  Not like mine,
That were my veritable blood, my naked self,
My body and my soul. All these I laid
One after another before you, and you trod
With delicate feet that never could have hurt me,
As birds might, on my body and on my soul,
And on my body's blood. God's cruel, dear:
And have I not been crueller than God?