Saturday, November 19, 2011

August Night

If you wanted the gleaming golden leaves on the trees
to be your harlequin, your palanquin,
you needed only to have told me.
I would have sprung, on Mercury's slippers,
into the tops of the trees
where the real leaves lie, with their real slippers,
with their buds of exchange
and their slippers like old theaters
breathing the dust of soliloquies
past, breathing the dust of two
children who thought they were adults
and were performing for each other
in that old theater on an august night
and the soft melting of whose lips
illustrated, unconsciously, the soft melting
of the snow in April, illustrated
the way all things fade away in the end.

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