And yet our star has perished on the air.
We are but one another's dearest care.
We are not naked yet.
We're veiled. We've but conversed,
Singing across a valley from far slope to slope
With a river dark between, and cold as hope.
Where is the bolt can hold our earth to earth,
Clinch roof to wall with a resistless prize?
Where is the stronger birth
Than this we practise? I have a vision
Of a bolt that pierces .all the veils, and bears
End to end of the world on its black shank.
Now let the bolt shore up this old house tight,
And this cold day be our so luminous night,
Oh, let us for once be wise.
TO MY WIFE
And does the heart grow old
?
You know
In the indiscriminate green
Of summer or in earliest snow
A landscape is another scene,
Inchoate and anonymous,
And every rock and bush and drift
As
our affections alter us
Will alter with the season's shift.
So love by love we come at last,
As
through the exclusions of a rhyme,
Or the exactions of a past,
To the simplicity of time,
The antiquity of grace, where yet
We live in terror and delight
With love as quiet as regret
And love like anger in the night.
Allen Grossman
