May Sarton

By Moonlight
We are true lovers without hope

Whose hearts are locked to time,

So lie with me on the grassy sward

On the cool black-shadowed slope,

For we’ll not sleep in a close warm room:

Whatever we are moving toward

An ample bed’s not our reward

Who are mad with the moon.

Wherever passionate love is leading

We’ll be discovering alone,

So little hope it can endure,

So wild, so deep, so dark the needing

That even fastened bone to bone,

We’ll not have lasting peace, that’s sure,

Nor any haven from despair

Who love by light of moon.

So come, though we shall never rest

In any house to call our own,

By any hearth we light and tend,

Lie here upon the cold earth’s breast

And lean your length hard on the stone:

Hearts break and they may also mend

But here until the certain end,

Wed me by light of moon.

Now the great open sky is ours

And the long light across the loam,

And we, gigantic hearts of dust,

Lie open like night-blooming flowers.

The homeless moon is our bright home,

And we shine too because we must,

Oh magic that we cannot trust,

The lovely changing moon!

Moving In
I moved into my house one day

In a downpour of leaves and rain,

“I took possession,” as they say,

With solitude for my domain.

At first it was an empty place

Where every room I came to meet

Watched me in silence like a face:

I heard the whisper of my feet.

So huge the absence walking there

Beside me on the yellow floor,

That one fly buzzing on the air

But made the stillness more and more.

What I possessed was all my own,

Yet not to be possessed at all,

And not a house or even hearthstone,

And never any sheltering wall.

There solitude became my task,

No shelter but a grave demand,

And I must answer, never ask,

Taking this bridegroom by the hand.

I moved into my life one day

In a downpour of leaves in flood,

I took possession, as they say,

And knew I was alone for good.

It’s life we harvest here

(Sun on the crimson vine).

How will you fashion love, how will you wake and keep

The pride, the purity of a great image freed of its emotion?

Nostalgia for India

In the clean, anodyne

Hotel room in Athens,

I am suddenly homesick for

The Indian night

And my dark cell

In Orissa

Where I was visited

By a white lizard

With emerald eyes,

By an articulate frog,

And sometimes, very late,

By a wandering shrew.

I do not have to love you

As I loved her,

To be devastated, but,

Angel and surgeon of the psyche,

I am free to love you now

Outside all the myths,

The confused dreams,

Beyond all the barriers,

In the warm natural light

Of simple day.

I am allowed to give you

Unstrained, flowing,

Wise-infant

To wise-mother love.

Sometimes I long to spend the rest of my life doing just that—making things for people I love

and believe and keep on believing without signs from me that I do love you and want you for my wife

And they could use the wind itself for harp

Wind seething in the leaves,

Waves on unbreaking waves.