When I loved it was only to love,
It was not to see the moon, or the five stars,
Or feel, in my hand, ever so slightly, the sweat of your hand,
Or be at the beginning of a long line of cars,
Or be a king lying in a tomb in a foreign land,
Or to weep at some black and white film’s end, a projector
In the old cinema humming somewhat behind my seat and above.
When I loved it was only to love.
It was not to hear, or to write a magnificent song,
Or sleep in the bottom of a boat in Venice when daylight rose,
Or be savagely sad, indignantly right, or happily wrong,
In a mist somewhere, deciding and not deciding
What cooperation, if any, I needed, from those I did not love.
When I loved it was only to love.
Or maybe I lie, and what I also had to do
As I loved, smiling, or not smiling, at you,
Was to be sane and gentle, and not go mad,
And when love inevitably ended,
To be happy for that saving grace, that you, too, were sad.