The Others

My others are the thousand shallow breaths A man will take to give himself short sleep, Safe by minor lives in minor deaths, And warm where water will not tell the deep Tall mountains of the central sea, or read The hard high-pressure country of its floor, But only wets the night it can’t exceed, And proves with less how much I need the more, But my one with you is like the deep-drawn air That pins the lungs, like the mile-under dark Of the Atlantic, and the river there That sweeps a quarter earth in one salt arc And never tires; but I, tiring, again Will rest myself with others, until when.

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