I: Evensong

He has come too late:
she has begun already,
undisturbed and steady,
her slow descent
into the landscape of her sleep,
where inner darkness lets
her mind illuminate
the secret corners she must keep.
The darkness he mistakes
for shadows on her face
is how the untouched
distance gathers to itself
the common recognition of a place,
releasing all into that isolation
whose firm denial has become her skin:
she is so unreachable for him,
and he has come too late:
within her striving out of sleep
he feels the cold and unfamiliar weight
of something other, deep, resistant,
dark and gentle, lax,
the way the evening sometimes
imperceptibly can change
the aspect and the feeling of a room.
She has become a garden, drained and distant,
turned (converted) to
the inadvertent ecstasy of bloom.