Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you 

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your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old men,
which once could call up the lost nouns

||

we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love 

GALWAY KINNEL