Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forwith, and we Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days For our majorities to rent With unshared friends and unwalked ways, But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of minorities That, unopposed at last, return Each night with cancelled promises They want renewed. They never learn.

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.