I caught a train that passed the town where you lived.

I caught a train that passed the town where you lived.

On the journey I thought of you.

One evening when the park was soaking

You hid beneath trees, and all around you dimmed itself

as if the earth were lit by gaslight.

We had faith that love would last forever.

I caught a train that passed the town where you lived. 

-Brian Patten

such an ache. when love is lost, when what you feel was the truest love of your life is lost, nothing matters anymore. i've been through that. and slowly, gradually i realize my part of the mistake in letting it end. but as the universe says, everything happens for a reason, and everything happens for good...so one love was lost, but one, truer love was gained. though this time, i won't be able to let her go...

Somewhere in the World

Somewhere in the world
something is happening
which will make its slow way here.

A cold front will come to destroy
the camellias, or perhaps it will be
a heat wave to scorch them.

A virus will move without passport
or papers to find me as I shake
a hand or kiss a cheek.

Somewhere a small quarrel
has begun, a few overheated words
ignite a conflagration,

and the smell of smoke
is on its way;
the smell of war.

Wherever I go I knock on wood—
on tabletops or tree trunks.
I rinse my hands over and over again;

I scan the newspapers
and invent alarm codes which are not
my husband's birthdate or my own.

But somewhere something is happening
against which there is no planning, only
those two aging conspirators, Hope and Luck.

"Somewhere in the World" by Linda Pastan, from Traveling Light. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Distant Woman

This woman fits in my hands. She is fair and blond, and I would carry her in my hands like a basket of magnolias.

This woman fits in my eyes. My gaze enfolds her, my gaze that sees nothing as it enfolds her.

This woman fits in my desires. She is naked before the yearning flame of my life, and my desire burns her like a live coal.

But, distant woman, my hands, my eyes, and my desires save for you their caresses, because only you, distant woman, only you fit in my heart.

-from Notebook 1, Pablo Neruda's 'Passions and Impressions'

Notebooks of Neruda, edited by Matilde Neruda and Miguel Otero Silva