One Night in November

Dear, are you tired tonight? It’s been so long—

      four whole days—since we have had chance to meet.

            There! See the line of lights so far away,

      chain of stars down either side of the street.

A necklace for your throat? I’d twist it round,

      and you could play with it. You smile at me

as though I were a little child, spellbound,

      behind whose eyes the fairies live and see.

The people on the street look up at us,

      all envious. We’re vicereine and viceroy,

      watching our subjects with a haughty joy.

Our royal carriage is a Greyhound bus.

My heart is crowded full of foolish thoughts,

      like early blooms in an April meadow.

            And I must give them to you, all of them,

      before they fade. The people I’ve let go,

or the film I saw; trivial, shifting things

      that hurry, gesturing along a wall,

glowing, growing beyond imaginings;

      shadows that loom too big or shrink too small

and here in my heart take their proper size

      when you have seen them. There’s the plaza now:

      A lake of light! Tonight, it seems somehow

that all the lights are gathered in your eyes.

The park below us bears a million lamps,

      scattered like the stars in wise disorder.

            We look down on them as God must look down

      On constellations ‘neath Heaven’s border,

tangled in clouds. Come, then, let us take flight

      since we’ve reached the park. Our gardens stand by,

all black and blossomless this winter night.

      But we bring April with us, you and I;

we set the whole world on the trail of spring.

      I think that every path that we took prior

      has marked our footprints in mysterious fire,

the delicate gold of a fairy’s wing.

When they wake at dawn in hollow tree trunks

      and come out on the drowsy park, they’ll look

            along the empty paths and say, “Oh, here

      they went, and here, and here, this path they took!

Here is their bench, take hands and let us dance

      about it in a winding ring and make

a circle round it only they can chance

      when they come back again!” Look at the lake—

Do you remember how we watched the swans

      that night in late October while they slept?

      Swans must have stately dreams, I think, except

now only thin lights reflect in the ponds.

They shake a little. How I long to take

      one from the cold black water—new-made gold—

            to give you in your hand! And see, and see,

      there’s a star the depths of the lake withhold!

Dimmer than pearl. If you stoop to its height,

      your hand could almost scoop and reach it up.

There was a new frail yellow moon tonight—

      I wish you could have had it for a cup.

What if the air should grow so dimly white

      that our foggy paths become misleading,

      made by walls of moving mist receding

the more we follow? What a silver night!

That was our bench the time you once told me

      your long new poem—but how differently,

            how eerie with the curtain of the fog

      making a stranger of each friendly tree!

There is no wind, and yet great curving scrolls

      carve themselves in the mist, ever changing.

Walk on, let me stand here watching your strolls

      to see you, too, grown farther, estranging...

I used to wonder how the park would seem

      if one night we could have it to our tastes— 

      no lovers with close arm-encircled waists

to whisper and break in upon our dream.