Tonight two step out
onto a fourth story porch,
lean against the railing, and look at the moon.
Whether they intend to stay
a while, or only a moment because something awaits,
terrible or tender,
I can’t say.
Whether one mutters to the other,
or they stand in silence,
I don’t know. And I don’t know
if they’re here together in a brief repose,
or at the edge
of something incommunicable.
I don’t know
if the man shivers now because he suddenly
sees the waste his life is to be in thirty years
on another shore, or because true autumn has begun
this moment of the present year, in a province
whose name evokes in half the world
a feeling of the vastness of the world.
I can tell you there is a war
going on, but don’t ask me
to distinguish if it’s ash, snow, or moonlight
that creases these people’s faces.