Hot Saturday expands toward twilight,
Spacious and warm. Their train, at the end of the line,
Haltingly departs from Coney Island,
And settles, after an initial whine,
 
To a lulling commotion, with which they, too, move,
He sixteen, she almost a year older;
They have been swimming and are in love,
And sit touching and rocking together.
 
Exercised and sober, their bodies are
Rested, tingling, refreshed and grave, compel
The tautened skin; he is freckled,
Her complexion of the Crimea
 
Is healthy olive-and-rose, her frequent smiles
Transcend what is perhaps a pout or the faint
Ruminative suckling of a child;
A severe and orphan dress disdains
 
The completed opulence of her body. Stretching,
They vie in banter with sunburned strangers nearby,
Break off, having acquitted themselves
With honor. Pride completes their pleasure.
 
They are indeed proud: of being lovers,
Of their advanced and noble sympathies,
Their happiness, their languorous wit
That mocks at dignity, ripens pleasure,
 
And candles the failure in these faces, then
Restores their opacity with kindly justice
 --- Imagining their competence exceeds
Every foreseeable occasion.
 
These are young gods defining love, banqueting
On glances and whispered smiles and amiable
Raillery, and believe inexhaustible
Their margin for error, and summon back


The solicitous waiter, command another course
Of immortal tenderness and levity,
Drunk and dazzled with love, twining fingers
On a summer evening after the War.
 
Fixed in force, the train persists on the ways,
Its windows intersect the streaming darkness;
Their expanding revery engages
Almost the first apparent stars.
 
A cunning and subterranean will
Even now detaches them toward other destinies,
Misery, impatience, division that shall
Complete their present and mutual ignorance.