Sarah Teasdale is buried in Bellefontaine, <br />And I wish to go and see her and water her grave <br />By a single tear I stole from the sea <br />Where all my cousin bachelors were sashaying <br />A shanty: <br />And if I worked all night and exhumed her long <br />Mane, then I could kiss her vanished lips, <br />And pour down them my wine, <br />As the cars of midnight salesmen trained <br />By the coal-lit road, and the sky full of nimbus moved <br />By, those ushering storms above naked trees, <br />Whose crooks are like arms raised upwards in <br />Hungering petitions, <br />As around her old house, they planted dozens of red <br />Roses, even as by this hour they make an untried day, <br />I kneel at the head of her perfumed rest, and lay my senses <br />Upon her unmoved breast; and call her there, though <br />She never knew me, by a memoir of a silent liar: <br />Thus I name myself while my heart still knells my breath, <br />Until I lie too in the quieted death, with sad egos <br />Loosed into the sea. Then, would not her gimlet eyes flutter <br />Like the gray curtains’ foreplay on the slatted shutters; <br />And see by the mutual light of those who have reposed, <br />Who are crowned by the epitaphs of gravestones, <br />And the fading pages left imprinted in the wilting stores; <br />Thus we might obtain new senses, to see by the dint of <br />Our waywardly species, to mutually cusp one another <br />So as to be mistaken as two flowers in a coupling braid <br />Waiting through the quieting hours as the storm, mounting, <br />Approaches with those chariots the sun brings to reward <br />The living, and to carry us away.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-carry-us-away/
