Fact of the Act

By Robert Graves
Saved Stories
ROBERT GRAVES
On the other side of the world’s narrow lane You lie in bed, your young breasts tingling With imagined kisses, your lips puckered, Your lists tight.
Dreaming yourself naked in my arms, Free from discovery, under some holm oak; The high sun peering through thick branches, All winds mute.
Endlessly you prolong the moment Of your delirium: a first engagement, Silent, inevitable, fearful, Honey-sweet.
Will it be so in fact? Will fact mirror Your virginal ecstasies: True love, uncircumstantial, No blame, no shame?
It is for you, now, to say “come”; It is for you, now, to prepare the bed; It is for you as the sole hostess Of your white dreams —
It is for you to open the locked gate, It is for you to shake red apples down, It is for you to halve them with my sword That both may eat.
Yet expectation lies as far from fact As fact’s own afterglow in memory; Fact is a dark return to man’s beginnings, Test of our hardihood, test of a willful And blind acceptance of each other As also flesh.