The hill is like night against the clear sky. Your head framed against it, barely moving, and moving with the sky. You are like a cloud seen between branches. In your eyes the laughter and strangeness of a sky that is not yours.

The hill of earth and leaves halts your bright gaze with its dark mass, your mouth has the curve of a gentle hollow between distant slopes. You seem to play with the great hill and the clearness of the sky: to please me you echo the ancient background and make it purer.

         But you live elsewhere.

Your gentle blood came from elsewhere. The words you say have no meeting-point with the rugged sadness of this sky. You are only a white and sweetly gentle cloud entangled one night among ancient branches.

What can I say to you? How can I retract All that that fool, my voice, has spoken_ Now that the facts are plain, the placid surface cracked, The protocols of friendship broken?

I cannot walk by day as now I walk at dawn Past the still house where you lie sleeping. May the sun burn these footprints on the lawn And hold you in its warmth and keeping.

Before you came things were just what they were: the road precisely a road, the horizon fixed, the limit of what could be seen, a glass of wine no more than a glass of wine.

With you the world took on the spectrum radiating from my heart: your eyes gold as they open to me, slate the colour that falls each time I lose all hope.

With your advent roses burst into flame: you were the artist of dried-up leaves, sorceress who flicked her wrist to change dust into soot. You lacquered the night black.

As for the sky, the road, the cup of wine: one was my tear-drenched shirt, the other an aching nerve, the third a mirror that never reflected the same thing.

Now you are here again - stay with me. This time things will fall into place; the road can be the road, the sky nothing but the sky; the glass of wine, as it should be, the glass of wine.