Friendship

In our once exuberance you pointed to this thing and said Our friendship is like this. Because the light in all our rooms was so Such I deemed the sun And thus the sun like us. But see, the subtler hues of that encroaching body Belie your happy metaphor, Which plucked too soon from the corbeil the brightest yellow daffodil And deemed it was the sense of the assemblage. Wipe the salt from off your lips And try the thing again.

Recall the crownèd beast, the stuttering animal Was brought to bleed at casual expenditure Of thirty tenders, gaudy just like this. Was our transaction here so different Which cashed in trifles long before our interest accrued To buy us back our weal?

And yet, it was with silver the solutioner was sold And not this ruddy brown which seems now papered, Dried and stuff, the brown of our autumnal dusk Which in the candid heat of our belittled end Was a small casualty for lusty loafing crunching feet. What of our distrction, our perplexity at him? The golden figure of this image, the specter Tall and hooded, half-concealed and Grimacing there behind the purple drape?

Whatever this thing is, whatever it is you will, Against it I have kept our secret close through nights, Stowed behind long mantlefolds hung long and low And deeply delved within a trunk, folded In the ponderous folds of dapple-grey and dusty quilts, Lingering longly, darkly in the room Where once the gleaming gloom of your bronze skin With my lips slowly moving, quivering and babbling, did collide.