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Across The Night

Don Marquis

Much listening through the silences,
  Much staring through the night,
And lo! the dumb blind distances
  Are bridged with speech and sight!

Magician Thought, informed of Love,
  Hath fixed her on the air—
Oh, Love and I laughed down the fates
  And clasped her, here as there!

Across the eerie silences
  She came in headlong flight,
She stormed the serried distances,
  She trampled space and night!

Oh, foolish scientists might give
  This miracle a name—
But Love and I care but to know
  That when we called she came.

And since I find the distances
  Subservient to my thought,
And of the sentient silences
  More vital speech have wrought,

Then she and I will mock Death’s self,
  For all his vaunted might—
There are no gulfs we dare not leap,
  As she leapt through the night!
Online text © 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Dreams & Dust | Harper & Brothers, 1915
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