The Life of Poetry Book

In a Dark House
"Two on the stairs in a house where they
had loved :
mounting, and the steps a long ascent
before them
brown: a single step creaking high in the
flight; the turn :
the quiet house and the cheese-yellow
walls shadowed by night,
dark; and the unlit lamps along the wall.
Dusk piles in old house-corners rapidly.
Shade grows
where corners round to flights of stairs
again. Evening
accumulates under the treads of
mounting stairs."
...
"He turns his face to her, walk unbroken.
Her face
questioning turns: there is no help for each
in the other.
There are no eyes on them.
The shaft is empty of voices, all but the creaking step,
regularly in the flights recurring, preknown, dreaded that sound.
There is no face that he can see but hers.
She knows his look, and has known it for a long time.
The creak of one step is a punctuating rhyme."