Late reading, and our books dissolve
in thunder, lightning through the rain;
their lights burn single in the mind.
Your novel and my novel move together,
line by line, like Noah’s animals,
who found the ark, each other as the flood-
tide rose. Our oaky bed, its headboard
of a prow, lifts over waves. Your hero
and my heroine engage, as night whelms over
and the one great plot, that salty stew,
as ever, thickens. In a single sheet, we feel
the rise and fall of breath, the generations
that have come and gone and come again.
Is nothing ever lost? Eternal climax,
denouement: we find ourselves, at dawn,
on that bare hillside, disembarked,
the animals afoot, our novels turning
on themselves again, their separate spines.