One is large, one very small:

there we are in the photograph,

bundled up by the all-night bonfire,

myself in my stockman's hat and you

swathed in shawl and scarf, everything hidden

but your Moorish eyes

 

Here is an old practice,

to build an outdoor blaze,

a bone fire is what they called it,

where the bones of animals

were burnt down to ash

 

A wind with the sting of ice crystals

comes singing through the trees

that ring the broad meadow, hissing

over the flat snowfield

to trouble the fire, the smoke

driven this way and that

 

On Forty-seventh Street the Hasid shakes hands;

Mazel und brucha, he says, Luck and blessing;

the ritual seals the contract without paper, without ink.

Across the square of black velvet

he scatters a palmful of glittering beauty

 

From time to time, one or the other of us

looks up from the bonfire and cries,

The stars! The stars! as though

none of our sisters and brothers, the living,

the dead, numberless as stars,

had ever looked up and said the same;

as though we didn't know these diamonds

poured out so freely across utter blackness

to be monstrous spheres of hellfire,

roaring in a heatless void

 

Swaddled up, huddled by the night fire,

see how far along we are, Theresa,

from the hot and naked days of our youth!

But my love for you smolders on

deep in my bones; it simmers

till my blood is scalding.

Come, put a hand to my face,

a hand between my thighs;

feel how I am fevered with it

 

When, in the murk of years to come,

by luck or blessing

you think of this night, remember

the wind-whipped bonfire, the stars,

my love for you: all these ardent things

that against the dreadful background

of vast and frozen darkness

burn on undaunted