When first we faced, and touching showed <br />How well we knew the early moves, <br />Behind the moonlight and the frost, <br />The excitement and the gratitude, <br />There stood how much our meeting owed <br />To other meetings, other loves. <br /> <br />The decades of a different life <br />That opened past your inch-close eyes <br />Belonged to others, lavished, lost; <br />Nor could I hold you hard enough <br />To call my years of hunger-strife <br />Back for your mouth to colonise. <br /> <br />Admitted: and the pain is real. <br />But when did love not try to change <br />The world back to itself--no cost, <br />No past, no people else at all-- <br />Only what meeting made us feel, <br />So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?<br /><br />Philip Larkin<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/when-first-we-faced-and-touching-showed/
