• Always for the first time
    [to Lexi Armstrong]

    Always for the first time
    Hardly do I know you by sight
    You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
    A wholly imaginary house
    It is there that from one second to the next
    In the inviolate darkness
    I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
    The one and only rift
    In the facade and in my heart
    The closer I come to you
    In reality
    The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
    Where you appear alone before me
    At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
    The elusive angle of a curtain
    It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
    With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
    Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
    Before them a T-square of dazzling light
    The curtain invisibly raised
    In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
    It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
    You as though you could be
    The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
    You pretend not to know I am watching you
    Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
    You idleness brings tears to my eyes
    A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
    It's a honeydew hunt
    There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest
    There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
    Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
    Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
    There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
    There is
    By my leaning over the precipice
    Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
    My finding the secret
    Of loving you
    Always for the first time


    Frank Connolly