When first we faced, and touching showed
 How well we knew the early moves,
 Behind the moonlight and the frost,
 The excitement and the gratitude,
 There stood how much our meeting owed
 To other meetings, other loves.

 The decades of a different life
 That opened past your inch-close eyes
 Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
 Nor could I hold you hard enough
 To call my years of hunger-strife
 Back for your mouth to colonise.

 Admitted: and the pain is real.
 But when did love not try to change
 The world back to itself--no cost,
 No past, no people else at all--
 Only what meeting made us feel,
 So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?