Swann's Way Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I don’t think I know you,
But the land is plentiful if unreal.
I really shouldn’t be trying to be doing this anymore:
To turn your head from quite far away-
To take your hand when you are not looking,
And kiss each pruned knuckle for a start:
But I can’t shake the feeling that I might be doing some good,
Or at least I am holding off the droughts of loneliness,
Remembering that I walk alone with you under the same sky,
Each of us singing songs only we can hear.
And there are people out there who I cannot remember,
But who remember me, though they may be very few,
And it is how I understand you in relationship to myself:
Unreasonably, I think of you ever day:
When my thoughts come in to the word upon awakening,
And when they drift away in the solitary bed at night,
And there sail through the courses of all the various
Actions I would like to put in place with you,
As if I were the great entrepreneur and you my enterprise:
But I know I cannot fully understand this,
Just as when I read a novel too fully realized for me to grasp
In totality- Something by Proust, whose pages
Are full of the strange viaducts of another language,
Even though translated cannot come clearly to my tongue,
So I am left with a hazy recollection of the places and people
Spoken of, as if an impression of life blurred by the rains and mist
Out upon the open greens and picnics where people try their
Best to meet; but I do understand the notion of love through you,
Be it a distant and infertile emotion, it is still one I wish to conclude,
And only through you, however unreasonable that may be;
I know such an unrequited venture may be perilous,
And in almost all certainty ill-advised, as even now you
Are letting the organs of your being sound out toward your more
Reasonable loves, those males who occupy your proximity
And habit, but it is not my appetite to dine like ordinary people,
But to be a sad and reclusive thing hunkered down for all durations,
Thus writing to you again with unreserved sincerity through my flawed
But prodigious pen, that you might look up some dawn and
Cast your thoughts far out in the gray and upset waves,
And thus risk the chance of drowning in the deepest furrows,
Only to be rewarded by a love that asks no quarter,
And will never surrender to the practical declivities,
But hopes for you the way a mountain rises unto the sky,
Thus piercing the greater meanings which surround us, ignoring
The masses’ caprice, and thus we find ourselves lying down upon
The unmalleable table between the terra ferma and ether.