I looked at life through stainless panes.
	  My friend and I then grew rife
	  And in clumsy love had strife:
Life's transparency in the littered lane

Lay sharded. Never again
	  Would sky suspend its peerless blue
	  As though some heaven loved we two,
For we two loved without sin.

Each sweet self-enmansioned soul
	 Came to battle in dire array
	 But would not fight, yet would not stay
-And each departed for obscurer goals.

What finer, more enlightened path
	 Might Life lend our wandering ways
	 Than sheltered friendship as a stay
Against galled wounds that make us wroth?

What against gauche chance may make amends?
	 What but friendship has the power
	 To wipe the brow in feverous hour--
What else may ease us ere the end?

Nothing else has friendship's function
	 Nor can solace the absent pain
	 Of friendship gone, not come again,
Friendship faded to a fiction.

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Poems in pieces

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