“A Special Night”

“I thought how utterly different that evening had been from any other in my life. Different not because there was high drama or intense romance, for there was neither. But different in the sense that her room had been transformed by her presence and the poet’s work into a lush and exotic island in the middle of a vast salt sea or a verdant, fruitful oasis surrounded by fatal sands. I knew myself, my romantic nature and tendency to hyperbolize, but the atmosphere in that room was not invented; it was almost tangible. Were science able—and some day it will be—to image the subtle energies filling that room, there would have been visible on the screen broad streamers of golden love-light drifting like tranced kites, soft undulations of gentian-blue tenderness spilling out like contented waves on a Himalayan lake, and bright flakes of silvered, radiant joy glinting in the air as they danced above and around our bodies.”