George Szirtes
Sealed With a Kiss
We were always beautiful. always. when we wrote
each other it was our beauty we were committing
to paper, a beauty composed of forgetting.
it was beauty that caught us, that set us afloat
on the great painted sea of our disasters.
it was beauty that moved us against the tide
of dead water, that slowly pushed us aside
and beached us. here we met the masters
of our fortunes: time, separation, space
with its inevitable music, the lost boys
of the movies, the sweatered girls, the slow
ring of dancers moving to white noise,
the simple sadness of the hand and face,
the loss of the sealed kiss, the long hard blow.
(From The YouTube sonnets, Brian Hyland.)