Elegy for the Living

We wash up side by side
to find each other

in the speakable world,
and, lulled into sense,

inhabit our landscape;
the curve

of that chair draped
with your shirt;

my glass of  water
seeded overnight with air.

After this bed
there’ ll be another,

so we’ ll roll
and keep rolling

until one of  us
will roll alone and try to roll

the other back — a trick
no one’ s yet pulled off —

and it’ ll be
as if   I dreamed you, dear,

as if   I dreamed this bed,
our touching limbs,

this room, the tree outside alive
with new wet light.

Not now. Not yet.