The Beginning of Evening

When the northern sky grew pale

with the setting of the sun,

and one half of the sky

held the other in its hand,

and the western streets knew winter,

and the cities were as grass,

and you were here among the hidden

like a child among the lost,

still the quietness was there, still

the shadows closed the blinds,

still the door between the windows

opened to your small, cold hands,

till a drift of southern swallows

swept above the apple trees,

and you slept among the rushes

beneath wasps and flies and bees.