My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, -- No, -- nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell', And with the day, distance again expands Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.

Yet, love endures, though starving and alone. A dove's wings clung about my heart each night With surging gentleness, and the blue stone Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.

I was reading Hart Crane today at Borders even though at the end it was too painful to read the next word in each line. He is a poet I had never read and I think who should be read. Consider these lines and go onto voyages into Crane's poetry and life:

And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave onto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed; Presumes no carnage, but this single change -- Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands .