You have closed your eyes.
A night is born
full of hidden wounds,
of dead sounds
as of corks
when the nets are let down to the water.
Your hands become a breath
of inviolable distances,
slippery as thoughts,
And that equivocation of the moon
and that gentlest rocking,
if you would lay them on my eyes,
touch the soul.
You are the woman who passes by
like a leaf
leaving an autumn fire in the trees.
—Stanley Kunitz, section V from “Meditations on Death” in The Collected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2000)
