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Tired of London When you came to town, Warm bubbling rains came, the teething leaves, Steaming spring earth, and the tough, small-footed birds; Reckless colors sifted the closed, dense sky As we went hand in hand through our larky maze In the cultivated stubble of Hampstead Heath: Monkshood, Foxglove, Canterbury Bells Composed themselves to drink the bovril air Thinned by the watery sun. You, with no sense of giving, Brought all the dangers I no longer dared; Netted the wind that roared through my rented bed, And, poised like Eros over Picadilly, Were always there. I cannot find the words to leave you with. This way love’s conversation, the body and mind of it, goes On after love: we shall come to call this love, And this roar in our ears which before very long We become, we shall call our song. Cambridge April 27, 1957 Your letter made me see myself grown old With only the past’s poor wing-dust shadows to hold, Dressed in violet hand-me-downs, half-asleep, only half, Queer as nines in the violet dust of my mind, Leaning in some sloping attic, like this one where I write 54 door in the mountain You all night, The wet, metaphorical Cambridge wind Sorry on the skylight. The New England landscape goes Like money: but here on Agassiz Walk we save Everything we have Under Great-Aunt Georgie’s georgian bed; A knot garden roots through Great-Aunt Georgie’s toes Three floors below: when summer comes, God knows We’ll dry the herbs Aunt Georgie grows: Who knows, who knows What goes on in her head. I read Thoreau myself, I listen for Thoreau Up here; wonder if there’s a burial mound Anywhere for Henry: pax, aetat. 45. Quiet Desperation. requiescat, Ducky: one of these nice days My niece, the one with one glass eye, Is driving me out to Walden Pond: Cross my heart, I hope to die. New York April 27, 1962 When we get old, they say, we’ll remember Things that had sunk below the mind’s waking reach In our distracted years; someday, knees blanketed, I will reach out To touch your face, your brown hair. Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth. I rest, tending children, in hollow, light rooms, Sleep in their milky fingers, after years Howling up on the tiles while my goblins threw their shoes. dream barker 55 ...

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