In the Museum at Teheran
a sentimental curator has placed
two fragments of bronze Grecian
heads together boy
and girl so that the faces black-
ened by the three thousand years of
desert sand & sun
seem to be whispering something
that the Gurgan lion & the wing-
ed dog of Azerbaijan
must not hear but I have heard
them as I hear you now half way
around the world
so simply & so quietly more like
a child than like a woman making
love say to me in
that soft lost near and distant voice
I’m happy now I’m happy oh don’t
move don’t go away.
Copyright Credit: James Laughlin, “In the Museum at Teheran” from Poems New and Selected. Copyright © 1996 by James Laughlin. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Source: Poems New and Selected (1998)