On the long shore, lit by the
To show them properly alone,
Two lovers suddenly
So that their shadows were as one.
The ordinary night was
For them by the swift tide of
That silently they took at flood,
And for a little time they prized Themselves emparadised.
Then, as if shaken by
Beneath the hard moon's bony light,
They stood together on the
Embarrassed in each other's
But still conspiring hand in hand,
Until they saw, there underfoot,
As though the world had found them out,
The goose fish turning up, though dead, His hugely grinning head.
There in the china light he lay,
Most ancient and corrupt and grey.
They hesitated at his smile,
Wondering what it seemed to
To lovers who a little
Before had thought to understand,
By violence upon the sand,
The only way that could be known To make a world their own.
It was a wide and moony
Together peaceful and obscene;
They knew not what he would express,
So finished a
He might mean failure or success,
But took it for an emblem
Their sudden, new and guilty
To be observed by, when they kissed, That rigid optimist.
So he became their patriarch,
Dreadfully mild in the half-dark.
His throat that the sand seemed to choke,
His picket teeth, these left their
But never did explain the
That so amused him, lying
While the moon went down to
Along the still and tilted track That bears the zodiac.
Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York.
He died of cancer at his home in University City,
Missouri on July 5th 1991.
