Sonnet XXV

Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
objects:
nothing mattered or had a name:
the world was made of air, which waited.

I knew rooms full of ashes,
tunnels where the moon lived,
rough warehouses that growled ‘get lost’,
questions that insisted in the sand.

Everything was empty, dead, mute,
fallen abandoned, and decayed:
inconceivably alien, it all

belonged to someone else – to no one:
till your beauty and your poverty
filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

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Sonnet LXXXI

And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

 

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

 

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray
wings, and I move

 

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.