When first we faced, and touching showed How well we knew the early moves, Behind the moonlight and the frost, The excitement and the gratitude, There stood how much our meeting owed To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life That opened past your inch-close eyes Belonged to others, lavished, lost; Nor could I hold you hard enough To call my years of hunger-strife Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real. But when did love not try to change The world back to itself--no cost, No past, no people else at all-- Only what meeting made us feel, So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

  Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light

Memories strike home, like slaps in the face; Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten

Return to my mind with stranger pain:

• Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.

Today, my love, leaves are thrashing the wind just as pedestrians are erecting again the buildings of this drab forbidding city, and our lives, as I lose track of them, are the lives of others derailing in time and getting things done. Impossible to make sense of any one face or mouth, though each distance is clear, and you are miles from here. Let your pure space crowd my heart, that we might stay awhile longer amid the flying debris. This moment, I swear it, isn't going anywhere