The long sodden dawns of August
   (gray blood of the heart's yawn)
     break to bland afternoons.

Deeper in August before it tumbles
   to all those coming -embers, 
    will come the near-meeting
   of the moon and Mars, 

the world taken with proximity of
   two dark rocks beamed on brightly
like a mother upon good sons.

It must be age, that such an event
   which, as written, "none who lives
      will ever witness again,"
evokes nothing.

Afternoon unto evening evinces a
   long Then, the then of your life,
stretching back like a black wake

   in starlight, a wake somehow
unconscious or fulsomely slept,
    so furled were you
in the lashings of living.
 
He wrote, whose words you worship
    as at a shrine, “how much more
romantic are we, like this, apart,
   untangled in the ways of earth,

how perfect we declined that
    cratered path, the dull smack
    of startling love"  – and you know
that he is wise and right.

You think of yourselves in
    separate darks,
two crania halo-ed in artificial light,
    remitting words through ether,

eyes of soft shadow, each unmoved
     by the likes of heavenly bodies
all but kissing, having nothing

on two earth forms that never will,
    never must, never wish to,
so intimate are rhey in their
        own dying masses

that any body would be jealous
    of such – of such's brilliance,
diffidence, dreadlessness,
    its pristine earth upon heaven,

its communion like bursting
    cormorants in the absolute
perfection that absolute distance
     bestows –

from the sodden dawns of August
   to the diadems dotting
      supernal dusks.