With fruit and flowers the board is decked,
    The wine and laughter flow;
I'll not complain—could one expect
    So dull a world to know?

You look across the fruit and flowers,
    My glance your glances find.—
It is our secret, only ours,
    Since all the world is blind.

You are beautiful and faded,
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir. In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust
That its sparkle may amuse you.

I do not care to talk to you although
  Your speech evokes a thousand sympathies,
  And all my being’s silent harmonies
Wake trembling into music. When you go
It is as if some sudden, dreadful blow
  Had severed all the strings with savage ease.
  No, do not talk; but let us rather seize
This intimate gift of silence which we know.
  Others may guess your thoughts from what you say,
As storms are guessed from clouds where darkness broods.
  To me the very essence of the day
Reveals its inner purpose and its moods;
  As poplars feel the rain and then straightway
Reverse their leaves and shimmer through the woods. 

As we unlocked it
there was nothing
in the safe
I wanted
to embrace
someone there
so intent to record
all we saw
paying attention meant
forgetting
everyone
but you
sexy
at that age or later on
a kind of stage
your solitude
a fictive situation
parceled among the crowd
multiplying your every gesture
in outline
unto degradation
I wanted to stop
defending comfort
and touch you to
begin undoing
the rigmarole
of our passing
union