All summer we moved in a villa brimful of echos, <br />Cool as the pearled interior of a conch. <br />Bells, hooves, of the high-stipping black goats woke us. <br />Around our bed the baronial furniture <br />Foundered through levels of light seagreen and strange. <br />Not one leaf wrinkled in the clearing air. <br />We dreamed how we were perfect, and we were. <br /> <br />Against bare, whitewashed walls, the furniture <br />Anchored itself, griffin-legged and darkly grained. <br />Two of us in a place meant for ten more- <br />Our footsteps multiplied in the shadowy chambers, <br />Our voices fathomed a profounder sound: <br />The walnut banquet table, the twelve chairs <br />Mirrored the intricate gestures of two others. <br /> <br />Heavy as a statuary, shapes not ours <br />Performed a dumbshow in the polished wood, <br />That cabinet without windows or doors: <br />He lifts an arm to bring her close, but she <br />Shies from his touch: his is an iron mood. <br />Seeing her freeze, he turns his face away. <br />They poise and grieve as in some old tragedy. <br /> <br />Moon-blanched and implacable, he and she <br />Would not be eased, released. Our each example <br />Of temderness dove through their purgatory <br />Like a planet, a stone, swallowed in a great darkness, <br />Leaving no sparky track, setting up no ripple. <br />Nightly we left them in their desert place. <br />Lights out, they dogged us, sleepless and envious: <br /> <br />We dreamed their arguments, their stricken voices. <br />We might embrace, but those two never did, <br />Come, so unlike us, to a stiff impasse, <br />Burdened in such a way we seemed the lighter- <br />Ourselves the haunters, and they, flesh and blood; <br />As if, above love's ruinage, we were <br />The heaven those two dreamed of, in despair.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-other-two/
