“Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday,
stood and marvelled at you. Yet the new city
was denied me and the unpersuaded landscape
darkened, as though I were nothing. Nor did things close by
venture to be understood. The street thrust upwards
at the lamp post: I could see it was an alien thing.
Over there a room, sympathetic, clear in the lamplight –
I was already a part; this they sensed, closed the shutters.
Remained there. Then a child cried. I knew the mothers
in the houses around, of what they are capable – and I knew
at once the inconsolable argument behind all weeping.
Or a voice sang out and reached a little beyond
expectation, or down below an old man
who coughed full of reproach, as if his body
were in the right and the gentler world in error. Then the hour struck,
but I counted too late, it fell past me.
Like a boy, a stranger, at last deemed worthy to join in
yet drops the ball and knows none of the games
in which the others indulge with such ease,
stands there, looks away – to where?: I stood and suddenly
became aware, you approached me, played with me, I understood,
grown-up night, and I gazed at you enraptured. Where the towers
raged and, with fate averted, a city loomed over me
and before me were ranged unknowable mountains
and in the narrowing circle of hungering strangeness
welled the random flickering of my feelings – :
there it was, higher one,
no shame for you, that you know me. Your breath
passed over me, across widening solemn expanses
your smile entered into me.”