When thinking jumped at night,
and gentle longing wound
one pale gaze around another,
wrapped one frail phrase around another,
waited for wisdom, to keep in a box
and words to leap like fish in new streams.

They came forth curious but late,
late but curious they came.
They swam together all summer long
until dripping November bequeathed its tears
and April’s promise got lost in snow,
already too slow to live in love’s high attics.

Then came the penalties of age:
That rage expires, that shouts fade to whispers,
that suddenly, early evening sleeps and naps
and nibbled sweets of thigh
no longer seem the centre of the world,
and the odour of being filters through nostrils of dust.

Married to internal buttoning and unbuttoning,
flesh divorces on some burial mound,
while thinking jumps at night and asks,
to where, went our honeyed underground
and did love fade and if so was it white?

...Still tonight, tonight, alone and dreaming
that blind and blundered need,
down dark chamber aisles,
stumbled, all warm with seed, to cry:
I’m free, oh god at last I’m free,
from that pendant thing hung cold and wry.