Classic Poem

Our names had to each other been two rumours:
Yours of a lengthy daring, quick
To brave but the more genial dangers,
And mine of head like heart,
A way of passion with slow human numbers
To make them go like death's unwilling escort
Boldly into regions not their own.

And thus for months of letters, whose same greeting
Below the faceless text grew lost
In such a plural not-quite-meeting —
Until you thought to come
And risk what hurt a common air and eating
Might do to that benevolence between us
Which mutual distance phrased perhaps too fine.

The necessary quorum of suspicions
Having been marshalled to declare
Mistrust of halt communications
(Words crippled to the page)
And pose a new agenda, live with questions
No truth but nearness of the eye might answer —
We put our language to the trial of looks

And stood like thieves of friendship, caught in strangeness
By the corporeal array
Which honesty had called to witness
How foreign was our flesh.
Both left the court then, under doom of shyness,
Seeking in time an arbiter to sample
Our dreamt acquaintance and pronounce it real.

For several timid weeks we wandered, slackly,
Through talk's uncounted stops and hours,
Not sure we moved at all, so gently
Did we construe, our minds
At mincing pace, lest, challenging too harshly
The verdict of this slow, humane November,
We be found phantom in our comrade-state.

Then came December and the Christmas shadow.
You had to be at home for that.
Both feared: would roaring Christmas swallow
Our night-like colloquies,
Deliver us to next year's bleak to-morrow?
Yet must the picture be a talk-lit darkness,
Of flickering instances, for so it was.

Loyally we rejected more resplendence
Than fitted such careers as ours
Engaged to lift truth's quiet brilliance
And meant to glow not flash.
Certain mild poems of yours gave an assurance
Of ardencies that had no need of rousing;
By urgent poems of mine we could waste time.

The fury rumour lent me I think faded.
You learned I had no witch's art
Of freak terrain where changelings, goaded,
Made my caprice their own.
The place I kept was also yours, appointed
By you for your enduringness, that sometimes
You might dwell after what you knew was past.

And the but cool-impassioned poet-person
I'd heard you for went flying too.
Your fervours were not faint — though chosen
To be few, were large.
I like, in the discreet, a bold discretion,
And you, with zeal of word, a silent spirit.
This makes us friends for any time of year.