Don’t tell me that you’ve been to the sea at night,
With the stars flung overhead like bubbles in a bottle of champagne,
And laid your cheek against the cool sand and bathed in the moonlight,
And tasted the salt on the air, with some other’s name—

Caught between your lips and carried away on a breath of wind,
As opaque blue water caresses the shore
Sky and sea blend together to hide from the earth where you sinned—
Where you loved someone else—where you don’t love me anymore.

Don’t tell me how the sun flings orange light into the sky,
In the flush of late afternoon just before it violet and indigo sets,
She gave the colors their hue and their poignant splendor, and not I,
And without you drain gray, and beauty forgets—

Not gray like the charcoal rains on the streets in Paris,
And neither like the cathedral mixed with the mist in Milan
But gray like the empty walls of a room alone and without you
Gray rooms I can never leave now that you are gone.