we took a walk through the public

gardens. There was jazz, pantomime, fortune

telling. Children ran with balloons, a happy

gravity, and thousands of faces floated by,

the human cloudbank held down

by joy. The self

is a wake, I thought, of something terribly

quick—like notes or prophesies

or the juggler at the heart

of our small crowd

playing a butcher knife, a flaming torch

and an apple he bites

each time it comes round.

We spent the day this way, a day

you told me you loved me

for the first time

as if in such a way we too could enter

that swift galaxy

where sense is made

of gravity. When dusk came on

he was still there.

In the dark only the flame was visible—the real

and its reflection in the blade—the apple

grown utterly invisible

to us, a patch of dark,

though he kept finding it and the beautiful

was secured again and again

by its loss.