"Should I find it impossible..."

Should I find it impossible to love one who is ashamed,

Living in privacy, one who offers to acquire my love for what I have done,

Entirely herself, one who depends on the piling snow to combine,

Or the rain to break apart; I forgive her January, weeping in public,

Her body’s right to impulse, to retreat,

Knowing the loneliness of what I care about.

I myself, thinking of uselessness, happiness, spend a month

Betraying my friends with lies, distance.

It is easier to spend the last dignity at once, in my mind, by shining,

A slug, a pit, a moth, by shining in mistakes,

In this lonely month.

What is it like to anticipate change,

To turn the disparate, the hated

Aside, giving silence its turn?

                     -- published in Art and Literature, An International Quarterly, Summer 1966