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Now reading
For C.
After the clash of elevator gates And the long sinking, she emerges where, A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare, She looks up toward the window where he waits, Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest Of the huge traffic bound forever west. On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye— Even this other pair whose high romance Had only the duration of a dance, And who, now taking leave with stricken eye, See each in each a whole new life forgone. For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn, Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief And baggage, yet with something like relief, It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas To cancel out their crossing, and unmake The amorous rough and tumble of their wake. We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share The frequent vistas of their large despair, Where love and all are swept to nothingness; Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love Which constant spirits are the keepers of, And which, though taken to be tame and staid, Is a wild sostenuto of the heart, A passion joined to courtesy and art Which has the quality of something made, Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent, Like a rose window or the firmament.