AN ANNUNCIATION

  She is my innocence, I her wisdom.
  Yeats                                                           

Do not let my wild erratic thought,
Which would strive to an unknown heaven,
Stir your greater calm. None are given
The final vision for which they sought,
None reach true conclusion. For were it so
We would lose our one knowledge, the earth below.

Not that you would admit to innocence,
Nor I some heaven as my actual end,
But so the souls of men and women tend
Whilst they seek their lives’ perfect sense.
The sun waits, the moon waits, not for us to explore
But each holds each to a course that is sure.

Not then a divorce of ambition and innocence,
Not the ever upward, ever rarified race,
Not the distant admiration of earthly grace:
Wedded here these make this world make sense.
Only when our lives are bound to each other’s course
Can we find in heaven and earth that common force.

So as the sun on a winter’s afternoon
Surprises us, I ask you, sitting so still
On the room’s far side, to come, if you will,
And dispel ambition’s present gloom,
To come and kiss me into consciousness, make real
This strange world, to which as yet I cannot kneel.