I’m tired of reaching for the tempered dream,
of stretching days and getting squeezed by years,
and bored with the swaggers, the pushes and shoves
of people in rushes to get somewhere,
like hogs in a slaughterhouse hoping to eat,
or children in the rye without a catcher.

I’d sooner starve alone in the lively air
than follow billions to a frigid doom.
Why chase the wind when we can turn and face it?
Why measure time by the mirror in our room,
when we can follow earth, sun, stars and moon?

And if I stop, and if you choose to stay,
I’ll know that now, today, is all we need.

Despite I have seen
cold, cold eyes,
your heated suns
bring me springtime.

Forget? Regret? I’ll never do either:
We were happy for an interlude in time.
Painful it was when we left each other,
But Love’s habit of charging, as a price, pain,
Is not, ironically, so shrewd a crime
That I should regret ever having paid
For an interlude of bliss, during which
We were contented, complete, and well laid.
Then we knew happiness of a different sort
Than the satisfactory existence
Endured before we played Love’s part,
And now endure with time and distance.
Memories of happiness sustain Love’s force;
Let's not defile them with bitter remorse.

Melville's voyages among the South Seas
truly commenced with his treatment by pen
of those friendly tribes he cherished no less
than the not less primitive hordes at home.

But some who embarked on his ship of the sea
repudiated his ship of the mind
as it sailed for frontiers never beheld
in pursuit of the whale and immortal time.

Defective products everywhere.
I stepped on one while walking
across the grass that grows like hair,
where lovers were sitting talking

about the money they’d make
by selling defective products.
Anyway, it wasn't a snake
or a squirrel or a pair of ducks

mating, it was an escalator
coming up out of the ground
from Hell, like the old dumb-waiter
in the haunted house around

the riverbend, that used to be
run up and down in the old days,
until the Yankees came and we
each dug a few graves

for the bodies that belonged to
the souls that returned to Hades
after the war. It caught my shoe
and jammed -- ****** and defectively made.

I wish I were close to you
as a blade of grass to earth.

Though trampelled above
or wintered frozen,

I'd deeply grow
in your warmth below.

We sat at the edge and watched the wind
and talked of things we thought about,
safe for the moment beyond the world’s stare,
secure in a love we dared to share
in spite of those who harbored doubt,
heedless of those who called love sin.

We haunted a place where ghosts depend
on outcast lovers to cheer them up,
for surely ghosts could understand
the fiery force at our command,
while they were cold, with empty cups,
as ours overflowed with life again.

But even the living succumb to true love,
and after a while, the world came to us.