Waiting beside the window while you were brushing
Back your hair, I looked out across the empty
Hotel boardwalk: only two gas lamps still burned,
Their twin pools of oval light lying undisturbed
In that warm, tea-leaf colored dawn, and out beyond
The shadows of the eelgrass, the shore went on
Increasing, drawing slowly at those endless
Gray acres of the sea . . . And I remember, too,
How the tall sea pines, heavy with lichen, now sank
Beneath the stand-still of the morning air … how,
When you rose from your chair, naked in lamplight,
You rose, all the same, out of a break in those trees,
As though some sudden disaffection had taken
You there: and already you were part of it,
Already passing into that underworld
Of tide-pull and unraveling dark—and it was
As if the small shore birds flew away from you then,
As if my dull stare now drove you out of reach.
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