My Grandmother's Love Letters

White Buildings

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars to-nightBut those of memory.Yet how much room for memory there isIn the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enoughFor the letters of my mother’s mother,Elizabeth,That have been pressed so longInto a corner of the roofThat they are brown and soft,And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such spaceSteps 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 playOld keys that are but echoes:Is the silence strong enoughTo carry back the music to its sourceAnd back to you againAs though to her?”

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the handThrough much of what she would not understand;And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roofWith such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

from White Buildings (1926)