I.
Two lovers walking in a lovers’ garden,
Dreaming old books with heavy-lidded pages
About two lovers walking in a garden.
They walk as dawdlingly as bark uncurls,
More inwardly than deep green lavishes;
They walk as timelessly as moss spells out
To every step the Braille of “dream forever,”
Where “forever” means an hour’s walk on moss.
His eyes that drowse too open, dream illusions:
That worlds—what kind?—exist outside the garden.
Then just in time both dim their eyes—to wake;
And then she sees no grief on earth beyond
The hint of pebbles in a sandal or
A starling lost in rhododendron bushes.
II.
Two lovers, speaking in a garden, spangling
Confetti of tropes. In fun articulating
Extravagant picnics of sound. Let her say: “I am
A mere coiffure of baubles who thank the sun,
‘It is your noon that loans us stellar ways.’”
“If head-dress,” let him answer,
“then Milky Way.
A pompadour of trellised fireflies.
An intricacy of comets at toss of the head,”
A disciplined waterfall of well-tuned skies.
“Then you, disheveler of cosmic primness,
It is who orchestrates that luminary
Lustre as startlingly as combs in winter.”
And he: “Swim, tortoise-shell, on such sweet tides!”
So let them speak—like Byzantines of love—
A minute in fun, their courtship having been
In truth least courtierlike of pastorals,
Needing each other as simply as fetching water
From stillness of wells. Two lovers, two true loves:
As inarticulate as bread is shared.
III.
A garden of togethers, waifs of groves,
Two twigs slender as rain, leaning
As tenderly as eyelids almost-meet.
Or else an “ah” and “oh,” a pair of breaths
So in, so through, so hoveringly past
Corporeal gates as if two sighs were drifting
Through sultry, gnat-stirred southlands, fluttered at
By dusks of moth-eyed, mild astonishments.
Yet lovers both: branded to the bone with knowledge,
Stifled to the lungs with incense of fulfilment,
Stained with each other’s scents like painter’s palettes.
Palettes whose perfect white is white and isn’t,
Being blended from all colors ever found.
Dark and pure their thicket of entangling;
Dark and heavy its cloying; darkly white
The gentleness—heavy, heavy—of the gorged lovers.
IV.
From time to time they watch a goldfish circling.
Beside white groves. The shade of saplings covers
The pond as chastely as a shadow longs.
White shadow, ceremoniously emblemed
With slow wet rings that fade as sad as gold does.
What have they to do—touching, as they walk,
Only each other’s knowing fingertips—
What have they to do, satiated and kind,
Two lovers in a garden-walk, what else
But watch a rainbow of fins paddle like petals
Across a mirrored indolence of birches?
More real than they themselves are, for an hour
Is not the only solid stuff in dreamland
The slow wet gold reflected from the circlings
Of fish on the reflected white of bark?
Here limbs are air, and contours cannot press.
And only surfaces are deep.
And nothing true except reflectedness.
V.
Here and now, nothing is willed, and nothing touches;
Not even the slowed up air—westering breezelessly—
Ripples the gauze of her shoulders. For an hour,
Luxuriance has grown past wantonness; has grown
Back down into a bud, as darkly pure
As satin, as unfolded as cocoons …
And so two lovers walking in a garden
Became one moon. Pure white, drained beyond fire,
One moon in empty skies,
Rich beyond clouds and to itself enough.