The Shining Hours, XX: Tell me, my simple and tranquil sweetheart

Tell me, my simple and tranquil sweetheart, tell me how much an absence, even of a day, saddens and stirs up love, and reawakens it in all its sleeping scalds?

I go to meet those who are returning from the wondrous distances to which at dawn you went; I sit beneath a tree at a bend of the path, and, on the road, watching their coming, I gaze and gaze earnestly at their eyes still bright with having seen you.

And I would kiss their fingers that have touched you, and cry out to them words they would not understand; and I listen a long while to the rhythm of their steps towards the shadow where the old evenings hold night prone.