But these are the dead things.
This was a summer-time, buried now like bones in some encrusted
vessel,
Fathoms deep.
Remember. Remember. Remember.
No. Forget!
,
The crisp spring leaves are sprouting. They will never fall.
Now, night
falls,
a sleeping silver cloak held by the stars.
o
God, the lost-gone loves still hurt us sometimes like a crown of
thorns.
Hugh Brooke
THE NURSE'S TALE
I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting
for a sire who dawdles among the isles,
and the seascape hollowed out by that boy's edged gaze
to contain one speck, one only, for years and years withheld.
And that speck, that curious man, has kept from home
till home is almost the forbidden place, till blood
and the tears of an old woman must run down
to satisfy the genius of place. Even then, what
can they exchange at last, father and son?
the driftwood stranger and the rooted boy
whose eyes have nothing now to
ask
the sea.
But all the time and everywhere
lies in ambush for the distracted eyeball
light: light on the ship racked up in port,
the chimney-stones, the scar whiter than smoke,
than her flanks, her hair, that true but aging bride.
Adrienne Rich
