THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY
Where are you, Dear?
What is it that I hold—
A shape, a phantom, who will not ease my pain?
O Beloved! My beloved!
What is it comes between our seeking arms?
Lip to lip we press
And breast to breast,
Straining to overleap the barrier,
And all the while we know
We are apart.
We know tomorrow we shall be
More horribly
Alone.
Do you remember
When we first cried out each to each?
How the valleys rang with laughter and gay words
And eager promises?
Do you remember how we told each other
Pain was over,
That nothing now could come
We could not still with kisses?
Do you remember those first days
When the world was lost in a dream and a forgetting
And eternity was ours?
Then, as the years followed,
Do you remember how we found
That pain must be?
How, heavy-hearted, we gazed bewildered
Into each other’s eyes,
Asking, why?
One night you would not speak,
And when I pressed you for your cause of silence
You said “I tried to tell you once
My heart’s dim heaviness,
But you are a man, you can never understand.”
And then I saw
That we were far away from one another,
For I had thought the same.
And after
In a quick ache of sympathy
We kissed and clung,
And then you slept.
I heard the little sobbing breaths
Like a hurt child’s
Of a loneliness I had no power to soothe.
We asked so much!
We looked to each other as some look to God,
And when God came not
And our lifted hands were empty
We cried out that love was dead.
We have grown patient since
And pitifully wise,
We see how little may be given,
And we are thankful
Lest there be nothing.
Yet even when I lay my wearied head
Upon your knees and fall asleep
To waken with your hand on my hot brow,
Then, when I thank God, if there be a God,
For you—
We are apart.
Yesterday I watched you
Protect the child against the winter cold.
Warmly you wrapped him
While his baby face laughed back at you
From its frame of softest fur:
I think a great hand comes and wraps us so,
Each in his loneliness as in an enfolding garment,
That we shall be ready
To make our last great journeying
Alone.
As the years go onward
Little by little we turn
And draw away from love’s dominion,
Little by little we loose the clinging hands
That hinder from adventuring,
Oftener and more often
We go apart
To ask ourselves
The inevitable question.
The friends we seek are questioners
Who strive, like us, to cross with thoughts
The illimitable void:
Therefore, Dear, give over
Trying to comfort,
Give over the wish to yield me
All I need—
Once long ago I lost myself in you,
Once long ago I was but part of you,
Bereft without you,
Mad for lack of you,
Now I am I,
Preparing to go onward
When the end shall come
Alone.