Lovers: you who suffice for each other might answer
questions about us. You clasp one another: . . .
what's your authority?
Listen: sometimes my lonely hands reach out
to possess one another; sometimes my used-up face
comforts itself in them. These things touch my senses . . . but who
could find in them franchise for daring to be . . .?
Yet you, who increase each by the other one's rapture
until, overcome, each begs the other: Enough! . . . You,
in the hands of each other growing to greater abundance
than vines in the greatest of years; you
who may perish, quite overpowered by your lover;
it is you that I ask about us. I know
why your touching's so fervent: those caresses preserve!
You safeguard forever the spot which your gentle hands cover
and, beating beneath, you feel the true pulse of permanence . . .
so that every embrace is almost to promise: Forever!
But yet: after those first frightened glances; when
yearning has stood at the window; and after
that first walk (once through the garden together) . . .
are you still the same, Lovers? When you raise
lips to the lips of the other, drinking each other
. . . strange, how those drinkers depart from it all.
Careful in gesture, die not the figures upon
Attic stelae amaze you? Is not Love, is not Parting
laid on the shoulders so lightly as to suggest
they are utterly different from ours? Consider the hands:
they press lightly, for all the strength of the torsos.
Those disciplined people knew this: We reach only so far.
This much is ours: to touch one another like this.
The Gods bear upon us more fiercely – but that is a matter for Gods.
Might not we find somewhere secret – simple and decent
and human? Some strip of our own fertile ground
to lie between river and rock? For, as theirs did,
our own heart exceeds us: we cannot trace it in pictures
(which tame it);
nor in godlike sculptures which yet more control it.
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