Classic Poem

The need to confide
Which Christ had
And every bird to bird
Though secretless their frantic code —

Shall I like meteor speed?
Flared martyr to companionhood
Streaking towards some Siberia of love,
There to fall stony, for the books to say:
" These homeless stars upon arrival turn
Instantly cool, are earth.
The danger to ourselves is less than theirs
Of fierce extinguishment
Before precipitant despair
Gains grave among us.
Seldom in daily midst the fevered bolt
Seeks catastrophic bosoming.
Sometimes we hear . . .
But the damage has been done
Either of curious old
Or at foreign distance.
The monuments are geographical."

Or shall I wait —
As the locked mouth of destiny
Opens at time's caprice?
Meanwhile mute dotard of itself?

My need to confide,
My friend man,
Is not my mouth's way of stealth
Nor my heart's need of nakedness.
It is my need for myself, man,
To be talking with it —
After these silences in which, man,
I with you made lingering consort,
The exchange being as between eyes
And, like the look that travels lover-round,
A drifting circuit, track of softest phrase
Worn garrulous with what we did not say.
For so to say was passion's nothing:
It was the love of seeming, man, to love.
And this is love:
To stare the wish of love
Across dissolving word-touch.
We shall not ever love by love.
Yours, man, was but the language of the wish.
I pledged the wish with you.
Then were you not there;
And I a talisman of speech
Whose need your wish but
That did pale as magic when
The evocation stands up real.

The need to confide;
For myself, to be talking with it;
To talk with it, man,
As you love-meant, nor for love could;
To be two, need and need's other,
And to know of these, man,
The other-me slackened
In myriad desire's dumb telling,
In the widespread trysting which knit
Never more than a yore-day of presage —
The need to confide,
As night to a night
That is morning turned late
By the twinkling of shadow with shine,
Abhorrence coeval of blurred intermittence:
O need to be day-same —
This flushed double dark
Which I join to itself.