Seated Lovers Quarreling at the River's Edge
Their angry voices fell among the waters,
As fell the willow through the air by waters;
Washed southward, sinking voices, following birds
In dissolution blue as heavenly flight.
Their stony bodies held up by their chairs
Swayed with a discontent below the willow;
They watched the waters take their sullen tongues
And mingle them; in the willow-mingled air,
Nothing they cried seemed not already drowned
As if they had long floated under water,
Then surfaced fouled in one another's reach,
Conversing in the shallow's watery speech,
Mere suicidal luck to be together . . .
She drowned some five, and he ten miles up
The blood-red river of the late sun's falling.
Everything moved sullen down and south.
LEONARD NATHAN
He turned to her to find the ghost or beast
His ghost or beast could call improper names,
But found at last his woman, nothing more,
Who stared from herself at him and not beyond.
Everything looked smaller and fell still:
Water and willow froze in iron poise.
"So this is what, after all, you are,"
The stillness said over the death of motion,
As evening, a stranger, cast encircling shadow.
They rose or what the river left them rose
Stiff and unbeautiful but shaped to tact
As ancient as the sea deep to the south
That rivers dissolve to; yet the air still lurked,
Moving behind them as they went upright.
And over the unseen river, meanwhile, sped
The always falling willow down the dark.
Structure
33 lines · 3 stanzas