letter on the Upper Nile

letter on the Upper Nile

     And taking our your letter under dusk's long firmament

     I let the words you wrote fly upwards like fleeing birds,

     and high among their fellow birds they swung and swirled

     and wove the whole deep sky into a seamless garment

     of blue gone to black and star-gold, in which we two were furled.

     So we lay all that night, wrapped in your canopy of words.

     And all that was created wild, river and rock and air,

     lay in complicity with us: the water swirled the stone,

     found out its crevices, the river's bed a bed

     for lovers; and air lay with earth and made a fervent pair.

The torrents of our eyes spated the water, our love-sighs fed

the wind, and in our triumph nothing was loveless or alone.