Because I was discontented with my wife
and you are beautiful, I fell in love
thinking that love alone was valuable
and worth recall, ready to abandon all
for this unsought intensity of life.

With more to lose, cautious for comfort's sake,
you fit your feeling to a routine shape,
lengthening winter's coldness into spring
as if in doing so you hope to win
a victory over passion for the mass.

Together we might find a compromise,
on frosty nights or in a morning bed
and read, in meeting one another's eyes,
the story of the life we might have led.