screaming not to lose, since I cannot forget you

Day 23: 'window'

This is a remnant of sophomore year (high school), when I fell for Edna and all her delicious heartbreak and woe...

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When the tree-sparrows with no sound through the pearl-pale air
Of dawn, down the apple-branches, stair by stair,
With utmost, unforgettable, elegance and grace
Descend to the bare ground (never bare
Of small strewn seeds
For forced-down flyers at this treacherous time of year),
And richly and sweetly tittered there,
I pressed my forehead to the window, butting the cold glass
Till I feared it might break, disturbing the sparrows, so let the moment pass
When I had hoped to recapture the rapture of my dark dream;
I had heard as I awoke my own voice thinly scream,
"Where? in what street? (I knew the city) did they attack
You, bound for home?"
You were, of course, not there.
And I of course wept, remembering where I last had met you,
Yet clawed with desperate nails at the sliding dream, screaming not to lose, since I cannot forget you.
I felt the hot tears come;
Streaming with useless tears, which make the ears roar and the eyelids swell,
My blind face sought the window-sill
To cry on - frozen mourning melted by sly sleep,
Slapping hard-bought repose with quick successive blows until it whimper and outright weep

The tide pulls twice a day,
The sunlit and the moonlit tides
Drag rough ledge away
And bring back seaweed, little else besides.
Oh, do not weep those tears saltier than the flung spray!
Weepers are the sea's brides...
I mean this the drowning way

[Edna St. Vincent Millay, {1892-1950}, 'When the tree-sparrows with no sound through the pearl-pale air']