You are like me, you will die too, but not today:   
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:   
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been   
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost   
radio, may never be an oil painting or 
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are 
a concordance of person, number, voice, 
and place, strawberries spread through your name   
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me   
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear 
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),   
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:   
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium 
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star   
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving 
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is   
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, 
when there was snow), you are my right, 
have come to be my night (your body takes on   
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep   
becomes you): and you fall from the sky 
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth 
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees   
and seas have flown away, I call it 
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,   
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,   
and free of any eden we can name