Massachusetts and summer long ago.
         We could not keep our hands off each other.
All one rainy afternoon, I read to you;
         in the deep woods a thrush sang somewhere.

I wept when Adam confesses he cannot live
         without her, alone in the woods again,
so strong the bond of nature; and then Eve
         says life may be sweeter for what she has done.

After you left, I remember feeling as though
         I stood at the edge of a great darkness.
If you and I went back there, I could show
         you just where, in the landscape, I felt this.

But my heart lied, in the extremity of feeling,
         and I knew this too, and for the first time:
that my keeping you somehow lay in my letting
         you go; that I would not die of love like Adam,

who stood there with the fading flower crown
         he wove to celebrate Eve’s coming back
from their first separation, petals dropping down,
         and to himself the inward silence broke.