If ever there was a story
Whose subject was paradise
And whose theme was its loss,
It was his: it was 4 a.m.,
A screen door was banging
In an abandoned house
At the end of the street,
And time after time the neighbor’s
Watchdog hurled itself
Against its metal chain;
And even as it was
So late in the year, the old
Blown leaves kept scuffing
The pavement, annoyed,
It seemed, to have come this far
Just to find themselves
In some sleepless hour, adrift
In an air still summery
With the thought of her …
And who would not think,
Just to know how it feels,
That the man who was lying
In bed awake, and the woman
Whose absence stood round him
In a ring, were both tonight
So nearly composed
Of the world outside
That to be there was enough
To awaken, like a sound,
That time which time brings
Back to them. And yet,
How little that all really
Mattered to the man, or the fact
That his story might become,
One day, an occasion
For the woman to dis
Appear into a presence
She’d discover was all her own,
As if the lover within her
Were Eve herself, and Adam
The lover within him. But isn’t
That, after all, our old habit
Of dreaming? To find
Late at night that someone
Has come to lie down
In our beds, someone
Who, unable to sleep,
Starts telling a story
Of two people whose lives
Have grown apart from each other,
And telling it in a way
That sounds familiar
At first, until gradually
We see it’s really us
That person is talking about,
Though what we remember
We could not have seen:
How the banging door
Has changed itself Into
an axehandle
Hammered on a stone,
How the watchdog’s become
A broken cup on the lawn,
And the leaves have turned,
As if it’s true, into a playground
Of children holding hands
In a ring. And so it was,
Giving up to the story,
That the man awake
Finally closed his eyes
And lay perfectly still, and then
His mind made sunrise, and he slept.
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