We are two brothers, and I the elder:
We commute all summer to a bay a little behind Coney Island …
In our boarding house is a man with a wax nose and a blind wife …
The boarding-house landlady is so fat she has to be wheeled about …
The food is bad … there are mosquitoes …

I am blindly sad, but every evening my brother and I set out over the long foot-bridge across the bay …
People are trudging: in the twilight the rockets break in the sky …
The sea-wind comes freshly in the summer evening …
We are soon with music and darkness and stars and the sea …

And on Sunday afternoon we are on the porch of the hotel along the beach …
The world is a burst of shine, vivid and dazzling …
As we come up the side-porch, we see, between pillars, the bright blue sea,
We take great gusts of wind through our clothes and over our faces,
We smell the cool salt in the hot summer air …

I am dreaming: I do not know it, but I have gone down to the magic dream of the Greek …
The everlasting rolling of the sea, the ever-shining heavens, the ever-living gods,
And he, Narcissus, leaning over the water …

Such a yearning is in me, I long for I know not what,
Beauty again, and nakedness, and passion, and song …
Something removed from pink wax noses, mammoth landladies,
Commuting crowds, hotel porches, business …

We round the corner: and in the corner sit man and wife and young daughter …
And I look at that dark girl and she looks at me …
And a mystic fatal flash goes through me, a magic love,
And we burn into each other … and I pass …

Thereafter I go often, seeking … she is never found …
I only know she is dark and strange and beautiful and wistful …
I only know the pain in her face that is also the pain in my heart …
I only know I have found myself in another …
Narcissus leaning over the water …