Letter from the Mountains

There was a message. I have forgotten it.

There was a journey to make. It did not come to anything.

But these nights, my friend, under the iron roof

Of this old rabbiters' hut where the traps

Are still hanging up on nails,

Lying in a dry bunk, I feel strangely at ease.

The true dreams, those longed-for strangers,

Begin to come to me through the gates of horn.

I will not explain them. But the city, all that other life

In which we crept sadly like animals

Through thickets of dark thorns, haunted by the moisture of women,

And the rock of barren friendship, has now another shape.

Yes, I thank you. I saw you rise like a Triton,

A great reddish gourd of flesh,

From the sofa at that last party, while your mistress smiled

That perfect smile, and shout as if drowning—

'You are always—'

Despair is the only gift;

When it is shared, it becomes a different thing; like rock, like water;

And so you also can share this emptiness with me.

Tears from faces of stone. They are our own tears.

Even if I had forgotten them

The mountain that has taken my being to itself

Would still hang over this hut, with the dead and the living

Twined in its crevasses. My door has forgotten how to shut.

Source: Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1981)