Neither the moon nor stars alone allure.
Celestial lips may good metaphors make,
yet we can’t long mere metaphor endure:
we seek cliché for companionship’s sake.

Were this duvet draped over you and I
I’d have no need to exercise my mind,
for it’s the body not the mind that dies.
If only I could the perfect words find

I might countenance life’s great solitude:
hard as love may be, it is harder to write.
Still I write you into my arms, O crude
reprieve from those interminable nights

which beckon their own alluring relief!
What does the drowning man desire most?
Are we not all drowning in quiet grief
like shipwrecks ever-longing for the coast?

I long for you is no dreadful cliché:
all poems fail; all vessels sail away.