Miss Rosa Coldfield believed an ogre (the ogre was she).

*

'Let us lie in bed together while you tell me what love is.'

*

Living is one constant and perpetual instant
when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust

if we had dared, were brave enough, (not wise enough:
no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either [...]

[O]nly how to recreate, renew;
and comprehend that there is a might-have-been which is more than truth, 

from which the dreamer, waking, says not 'Did I but dream?' but rather says,
indicts high heaven's very self with:

'Why did I wake since waking I shall never sleep again.'

*

 

all the dream panoply of surrender which was my surrender

Yes, found her standing before that closed door which I was not to enter
(and which she herself did not enter)

 

*

love could not have stood me so.

*

 That was all. 

Or rather, not all, since there is no all, no finish;

it not the blow we suffer from the tedious anti-climax of it,
the rubbishly aftermath to clear away from off the very threshold of despair.

But not love, not faith itself, themselves. 

Love without hope perhaps, faith with little be proud with:
but love and faith at least above [...] the folly,

to salvage at least
from the humbled indicted dust

something anyway of the old lost enchantment of the heart.

 

*

I was in the garden [...] where the path came up from the stable lot.
I looked up and saw him looking at me; he stood there in the path looking at me.

He had seen me for twenty years , but now he was looking at me;
he stood there in the path looking at me, in the middle of the afternoon. That was it.

 

*

But root and urge I do insist and claim!

*

(a mini-story on love and loss and love
{of the self -- the ogre was I}

told in the direct but out-of-order voice of Rosa Coldfield, a la William Faulkner,

line breaks: mine)