HER FINGERS TOYED ABSENTLY WITH HER RINGS

There are fallen angels in the way you look

        And great bridges over silent streams at your smile.

Your gestures are a lonely princess dreaming over a book

        At a window over a lake, on some distant isle.

If I were to stretch my hand and touch yours that would be

        Dawn behind the turrets of a city in some East.

The words hidden in my gesture would be moonlight on the sea

        Of your being something in my soul like gaiety in a feast.

Let your silence tell me of the numberless dreams that are you.

        Let the drooping of your eyelids prolong landscapes far away.

The jets of water return on the listening of being untrue

And this is the flower I pluck, with a sound, from what you unsay.

Blossoms, blossoms, blossoms along the road of your going to speak.

        Eighteenth century gardens, so sad in the middle of our drearning them now,

Are the way you are conscious of yourself on your eyelids, by your lips, through your cheek.

        A sick child sees the rain blur through the window of what you allow.

Do not footfall the silence that is the palace where our consciousness

        Is living at seeing gardens our duplicate lives of one soul.

What are we, in our dream of each other, but a picture which is

        The masterpiece of a painter that never painted at all?