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
Другие работы автора
Quaker Hill
Perspective never withers from their eyes; They keep that docile edict of the Spring That blends March with August Antarctic skies: These are but cows that see no other thing Than grass and snow, and their own inner being Through the ric...
To Emily Dickinson
You who desired so much—in vain to ask—Yet fed you hunger like an endless task, Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest—Achieved that stillness ultimately best, Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear
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...
Repose Of Rivers
The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea Flags, weeds
