Your voice, with clear location of June days, Called me outside the window. You were there, Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare Of uncontested summer all things raise Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

Then your love looked as simple and entire As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face As legible as pearskin's fleck and trace, Which promise always wine, by mottled fire More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall Into my hands, through all that naïve light, It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight As must have been the first great gift of all.

Ghost hands keep touching Me in this sunlight space by A window where I am at work.

Small hands unfasten my armor Of indifference, and begin to scrape Away the accretions of all these Unloved and unloving years.

Pale hands keep plunging through The spidery drought cracks of skin And unstop the springs of affection Long recessed in these hard bones.

And it is these winged hands of yours Flitting over my face, which move me from Brittle speech into fluid, salty silence.

Is discovering that the two boxes of books that have been AWOL for weeks have been traced and found. I can now re-read again my signed copy of Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy", though only if I make myself go the post office and haul 100 lbs of books up four flights of stairs.

Is reading a Richard Wilbur's poem about snow covered apple trees as I eat lunch, and look over at patches of unmelted whiteness on the far ground left over from yesterday's snow.