What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why

	What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,,
	I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
	Under my head till morning; but the rain
	Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
	Upon the glass and listen for reply,
	And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
	For unremembered lads that not again
	Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
	Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
	Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
	Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
	I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
	I only know that summer sang in me
	A little while, that in me sings no more.

	Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
	Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
	Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
	And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
	Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
	Nor clean the blood,  nor set the fractured bone;
	Yet many a man is making friends with death
	Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
	It may well be that in a difficult hour,
	Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
	Or nagged by want past resolutionŐs power,
	I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
	Or trade the memory of this night for food.
	It may well be.  I do not think I would.


	Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
	Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
	I miss hiim in the weeping of the rain;
	I want him at the shrinking of the tide;  
	The old snow melts at mountain-side,
	But last year's bitter loving must remain
	Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
	There are a hundred places where I fear
	To go, -- so with his memory they brim.
	And entering with relief some quiet place
	Where never fell his foot or shone his face
	I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
	And so stand stricken, so remembering him.


        	The Philosopher

	And what are you that, wanting you,
  		I should be kept awake
	As many nights as there are days
		With weeping for your sake?

	And what are you that, missing you,
  		As many days as crawl
	I should be listening to the wind
 		 And looking at the wall?

	I know a man that's a braver man
  		And twenty men as kind,
	And what are you, that you should be
  		The one man in my mind?

	Yet women's ways are witless ways,
  		As any sage will tell, --
	And what am I, that I should love
 		 So wisely and so well?


	- Edna St Vincent Millay