CURTAIN
GOODBYE,
Incredulously the, laced fingers loosen,
Slowly, sensation by sensation, from their warm interchange, And stiffen like frosted flowers in the November garden.
Already division piles emphasis like bullets, Already the one dark air is separate and strange.
Goodbye.
There is no touch now. The wave has broken That for a moment charged the desolate sea.
There is a word, or two, left to be spoken —Yet who would hear it? When so swiftly distance Outmeasures time, engulfs identity?
Already like the dreamer startled from sleep And the vivid image lost even in waking, There is no taste now for the shrunken sense to keep, And these, the dreamer's eyes, are not alive to weep, And this, the clinic heart, the dreamer's, is not breaking.
Is it so easy, then? Goodbye no more than this Quiet disaster? And is there cause for sorrow That in the small white murder of one kiss Are born two ghosts, two Hamlets, two soliloquies, Two worlds apart, tomorrow?
HELEN SPALDING.
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