Love

You squandered, with your guilty recklessness, our heart's desire,
and left behind, of our love, its tormented remnant:
an anthem whose echo rang loud in my heart,
one that in days past we both would sing.
It lived on as a rapture in which we swaggered
over the world, and reveled in our own world,
raising up from the ribs of love a house
from whose two balconies we looked out proudly over all others.

Visions in which, yesterday, life was sweet —
oh, for that yesterday that embraced our steps!
We roamed the vineyard, plucking from the vines;
we wandered the field, drinking deep of our meeting;
we hurried with the breeze up to the hilltops,
pouring out our longing as our desires pleased,
inventing pretexts and riddles
that we might be happy, secure, in our trysting place.

O dark one, O very color of caprice,
enough of the caprice that has struck us!
I want a love with no torment in it,
no temptation kindling what we crave —
a union of passions, a renunciation
of all release, an overflow of our contentment;
and in your eyes I would meet what is in my own,
caress it, and we would drown in our visions;
and the sweet things of life, when they appear,
our two eyes would behold them in our two selves.