Something fell love’s distance like a cry
Caught between a shadow and a wall
That echoes with its fall perpetually;
Something enemy was seen or heard
Flown from nowhere to the eye’s embrace,
And formed in space above the body’s space,
One half the view, one half the memory
Mixed equally in time’s appalling pace.
O you, magician of nostalgia,
For you are seascape and defective time,
What is remembrance but a tired stone
In the rich well by the hand thrown?
Illuminating darkness to the wind
That ruffles on the surface of the water
And drags the image of another place
Unwanted to reflection’s surface?
Something turned the eye from everyday
Encounter with the self and every self
And focused lens and color just on you,
Till you withdrew the landscape and the time,
The memory and the half of memory too,
And every shore the sea had sighed upon
Drawing hills and mountains from the view
Since, by your going, color went with you.
Something seemed to hold the afternoon
Forever in the future of your arm,
For insolence, distorted in your eyes,
Gave back the stare of sunlit quarries,
The murmur of a world becoming still
More guessed at, and more prodigal;
Like fractured music skidding in a void
When more than its intention’s overheard.
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