Somewhere off in the distant plumes of mountains,
Well beyond the verdant knolls and rural meadows
Of this broad and gentle countryside,
Down where the highway that peers the river
Collides softly with the city,
Your crystal lens discovers some bold new heart
That like a child’s toy gleams but an hour and departs.

The lens that tells apart the other men
Dispels the tender fiction of your touch,
For too much love must down the spillway run
And pluck away the feathers of the sun—
When in the earnest shade of senseless night
Where only firework provides a light—no!
We’ve learned to tread each other’s tortured lines,
That still for wasted, novel hours pine.
So here to sit and idle on the frame,
Another desperate tablet carved in vain.

There is no road that takes me back to you,
Nor dressing that could swathe this weeping wound.
Wild partitions do in shadows bloom,
And bloom they also in light of the sun,
And never cease till life is done.