I turn me to thee, for I need but to face
And behold thee as though naught’d befallen of late,
Now seeming at last to discern in thy grace
No path there was from which I might ’scape my fate.

Perchance is the venom now part of my vein,
Perchance is the void of the elsewhere no dread,
And mayhap I am but a wight to be ta’en
By what is not present, not by what is spread.

There falleth still noons as the one that fell here,
Where nothing o’ermastereth this hunger o’ mine
As to cast me within a full beaker of cheer,
With the rhymes yet unwrit I would drown in its tide,

And bite at its brim, and there shape the design
Of thy semblance, then hide me ‘n verses o’ shame,
Which none readeth, let us be plain, not e’en thine;
Nor I, to confess, shall return to the same.

It burneth about me to-day, and I dream
On the sights thou may’st see in the part of the earth
Where thou hast resolv’d to forget, as it seems,
And who knoweth if August be o’er there ‘nother hearth?

And I love not thee, as I know well enow,
Nor lovest thou me, not the thing that I be;
All bides in perfection of what was not so,
In the strains without death that I strive still to see.

And I miss not thy self, nor I miss thee at all,
For no day doth pass I have thee ‘side along,
In one wise or other, I truthfully call;
I miss not to miss thee, I miss knowing thee not.

Marco Delrio