In August

I.

It would be strange and beautiful if I could see you here in this fog and in the clouds past the hills out my window. I would be happy with much less than this, with a little voice and a quiet place and rain under big trees. I would be happy with your good intentions, your summer apples, I would be happy with everything too late you still have to give. I am a man of the world and I am reserved and I am writing under the pressure of knowing that I could be so much better. I would like something between us and over your shoulder and when I think of your raincoats and nightgowns the soft press of your heavy step is like the shadow of rain.

II.

Instantly and blackly my understanding clouds. I am cast-off and hardly lovely, hardly a bright colored thing. I have not known water or wind on water and reeds and drowned and rusted metal. I am inland and nested like a crow nesting in a small tree low to the ground. I am little and clean and preserved. We understand each other, you and I. We cling to gravel and wood. I told a man, my brother, that your face was like a face I had once seen painted and I told him how I left my chair and stood as definitely as I could and how you sat, with eyes and cheeks and neck, and how your hand, compelled by some horrible piety, rested thinly on your knee.

III.

All night the night presses the moon against the pots left to dry in the kitchen sink. There are black trees now and empty places where I walk. I am like an actress. I am like someone with no complaints standing in the wings. I am a small boy in a horse barn touching horses. I am an old man who cannot remember the face of his mother. There is a way of loving stupidly and lagging behind. There is a stage and we stand on it and it is not a true vigil if it is knowing all the time that she will come.