THE BLIZZARD IN THE BOTTLE

Sometimes in the cages of night, in work
that is not of the heart,
as once in another year, another dark,
she is there across the room, reading; gilt
by a common lamp, tired by a common end,
that part us though they join: so she would go,
and be tonight tomorrow's contradiction.

Our love appeared to us in little
gestures, in words; and yet
our lonely rooms knew granite, knew the battle,
knew the air, of love that was not spilt
over apparent lips but lay profound
in a drift of images, immediate though 
denied the link and lamplight of an action.

The blizzard in the bottle, weather
captured yet remote,
unreal unless the eye itself can gather
perspectives to a pupil: so I have felt
her, in space and history, though beyond
their glass - as if at the war's end that ends too,
or to be separate were our imperfection.

Now I scramble at the wire
of a tall Present, but
the old immediacy of love is there
as once in a former country when we built 
in common work and sentience, the land
of equal things: gentle as air, but true
and necessary as the world's direction.