And you look through all these photos
Spread out
Showing all the things you've been through in life
Capturing that still moment of what you care about to never forget it
And they can mean one of two things:
How much you've lost
Or how much you've grown
Life is all about perspective
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die,
Rise others vaster yet,
And those are brown and dry.
They are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town,
And bury in solid sand
The men she could not drown.
She may know cove and cape,
But she does not know mankind
If by any change of shape,
She hopes to cut off mind.
Men left her a ship to sink:
They can leave her a hut as well;
And be but more free to think
For the one more cast off shell.
As far as I can see this autumn haze
That spreading in the evening air both ways,
Makes the new moon look anything but new,
And pours the elm-tree meadow full of blue,
Is all the smoke from one poor house alone
With but one chimney it can call its own;
So close it will not light an early light,
Keeping its life so close and out of sight
No one for hours has set a foot outdoors
So much as to take care of evening chores.
The inmates may be lonely women-folk.
I want to tell them that with all this smoke
They prudently are spinning their cocoon
And anchoring it to an earth and moon
From which no winter gale can hope to blow it,--
Spinning their own cocoon did they but know it.
Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In one last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. ‘This is all,’ they sighed,
‘Good-night to woods.’ But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew--
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
This evening I walk the streets
hand in hand with my grief.
I have left, locked in my house,
my disabled memories
and my crazy dreams.
So, the streets, my grief, and I
are ruling the world tonight.
Oh, you cannot imagine
how relaxed this walk is,
without those foolish memories
and those mad dreams.
remote farm
the unmowed hay higher
than the bale
The town is still asleep.
The sky is pale with quickening light.
Quenched, the long night of stars
Swirls under the earth, but one,
That silver planet, Venus, holds
Over the ice-haired lawns
A vernal promise: that love is not lost.
Walk through the streets
With birds and the clatter-clack
Of streetlights as they change,
A little tremble as the chill of night
Dies in a sunburst from the trees,
A vacant house whose owner dies,
A fallen elm, an abscess in the line
Of shops, a broken pane. I hold
My book which is all I may carry away,
Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,
Within our bellies, we her chariot.
Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,
And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body and the feet.
Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.
Heaven-invading hills are drowned
In wide moving waves of mist,
Phlox before my door are wound
In dripping wreaths of amethyst.
Ten feet away the solid earth
Changes into melting cloud,
There is a hush of pain and mirth,
No bird has heart to speak aloud.
Here in a world without a sky,
Without the ground, without the sea,
The one unchanging thing is I,
Myself remains to comfort me.
I know a certain tune that my life plays;
Over and over I have heard it start
With all the wavering loveliness of viols
And gain in swiftness like a runner’s heart.
It climbs and climbs; I watch it sway in climbing
High over time, high even over doubt,
It has all heaven to itself--it pauses
And faltering blindly down the air, goes out.