your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows

Not for these lovely blooms that prank your chambers did I come. 

    Indeed, 

I could have loved you better in the dark; 

That is to say, in rooms less bright with roses, rooms more casual, 

    less aware 

Of History in the wings about to enter with benevolent air 

On ponderous tiptoe, at the cue, “Proceed.” 

Not that I like the ash-trays over-crowded and the place in a mess, 

Or the monastic cubicle too unctuously austere and stark, 

But partly that these formal garlands for our Eighth Street Aphrodite 

    are a bit too Greek, 

And partly that to make the poor walls rich with our unaided 

    loveliness 

Would have been more chic. 

Yet here I am, having told you of my quarrel with the taxi-driver 

    over a line of Milton, and you laugh; and you are you, none 

    other. 

Your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows. 

But I am perverse: I wish you had not scrubbed—with pumice, 

    I suppose— 

The tobacco stains from your beautiful fingers. And I wish I did not 

    feel like your mother. 

[Edna St. Vincent Millay {1892-1950} 'Rendezvous', from The open door : one hundred poems, one hundred years of Poetry magazine - originally published in Huntsman, What Quarry?, 1939]