My dear, it was a moment <br />to clutch for a moment <br />so that you may believe in it <br />and believing is the act of love, I think, <br />even in the telling, wherever it went. <br /> <br />In the false New England forest <br />where the misplanted Norwegian trees <br />refused to root, their thick synthetic <br />roots barging out of the dirt to work on the air, <br />we held hands and walked on our knees. <br />Actually, there was no one there. <br /> <br />For fourty years this experimental <br />woodland grew, shaft by shaft in perfect rows <br />where its stub branches held and its spokes fell. <br />It was a place of parallel trees, their lives <br />filed out in exile where we walked too alien to know <br />our sameness and how our sameness survives. <br /> <br />Outside of us the village cars followed <br />the white line we had carefully walked <br />two nights before toward our single beds. <br />We lay halfway up an ugly hill and if we fell <br />it was here in the woods where the woods were caught <br />in their dying and you held me well. <br /> <br />And now I must dream the forest whole <br />and your sweet hands, not once as frozen <br />as those stopped trees, nor ruled, nor pale, <br />nor leaving mine. Today in my house, I see <br />our house, its pillars a dim basement of men <br />holding up their foreign ground for you and me. <br /> <br />My dear, it was a time, <br />butchered from time <br />that we must tell of quickly <br />before we lose the sound of our own <br />mouths calling mine, mine, mine.<br /><br />Anne Sexton<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-expatriates/
