My Grandmothers Love Letters
There are no stars to-night But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long Into a corner of the roof That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself: "Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her?" Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble.
And the rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
Harold Hart Crane
Other author posts
Recitative
Regard the capture here, 0 Janus-faced, As double as the hands that twist this glass Such eves at search or rest you cannot see; Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear
The Dance
The swift red flesh, a winter king— Who squired the glacier woman down the sky She ran the neighing canyons all the spring; She spouted arms; she rose with maize—to die And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands With mineral wa...
Chaplinesque
We will make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random As the wind In slithered and too ample pockets
Carrier Letter
My hands have not touched water since your hands, -No; - nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell' And with the day, distance again Between us, voiceless as an uncoiled shell Yet, - much follows, much endures… Trust birds alone:
