Owning Everything

For your sake I said I will praise the moon, tell the colour of the river, find new words for the agony and ecstasy of gulls. Because you are close, everything that men make, observe or plant is close, is mine: the gulls slowly writhing, slowly singing on the spears of wind; the iron gate above the river; the bridge holding between stone fingers her cold bright necklace of pearls. The branches of shore trees, like trembling charts of rivers, call the moon for an ally to claim their sharp journeys out of the dark sky, but nothing in the sky responds. The branches only give a sound to miles of wind. With your body and your speaking you have spoken for everything, robbed me of my strangerhood, made me one with the root and gull and stone, and because I sleep so near to you I cannot embrace or have my private love with them. You worry that I will leave you. I will not leave you. Only strangers travel. Owning everything, I have nowhere to go.