Closed windows, heavy glass. Glass so thick
I can't hear the wind I see shake the stiff 'ohai,
The raintree's leafy shield.
I can't hear the racked eucalyptus wail
Or pelted bushes that brush the pane.
This is the way our world might seem to a god
Who is not with us-clear but soundless-
As if at once close and very far off.
Or to lovers who dream the face of the loved other,
The one they may never see again but forever trust.
The chill of distance. A ghastly design of leaves
In back of glass. The streaming leaves,
The plunges they take in the early dark,
Their rearing, their riding, their abrupt halts,
And all entirely silent, sealed by a frame.
Such beauty murders, strikes a blow there's no balm for,
A cold pain, the stone of a slow fright growing inside,
Or a livid bruise on the skin. As if I were dead
Nothing that happens where you are seems real to me.
But I am not dead. I have no love left
And these heavy storms are like love,
These leaves, the breath of the wind going through them,
The rain flailing and tearing at them in the early dark,
Night coming down bare into the world.
The hardness of life without shelter.
But I have to go out there into the gale
Beyond the dense silence of the glass
Into the rain slapping at the other side,
And hear the leaves singing their panic aloud
As they fall in the frenzied wind. It is my life.