Dropping

[rejectomorph]

We racked up an hour or so of sunlight this afternoon. Broken clouds edged blue meads where the sun would briefly graze only to be lost again in gray thickets. The pavement nearly dried, but beads of water clung to grass blades and glittered each time the sun emerged. Night crept through canyons, then welled up to drown the fields and forests as the sky's glow faded. The cloud ranks closed, and slow rain resumed. Now I think of the hidden stars and feel deprived, no matter how many transient constellations the raindrops suggest to my ear.




Sunday Verse

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

by Hart Crane


There are no stars tonight
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.

Comments

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

what a lovely poem! i've read too little hart crane, i'd say.

i hope the stars shine for you tonight.

[rejectomorph]

There are a couple of dozen Hart Crane poems online, scattered about various web sites.

I'm hoping the sky clears long enough for me to get a glimpse of the lunar eclipse tonight.