Читать книгу Door in the Mountain - Jean Valentine - Страница 87

To Salter's Point

Frances Wadsworth Valentine

1880–1959

Here in Framingham, black, unlikely

Wheel spoking into mild Republican townships,

I have come to where the world drops off

Into an emptiness that cannot bear

Or lacks the center to compel

The barest sparrow feather's falling.

Maybe our mortal calling

Is, after all, to fall

Regarded by some most tender care:

But here, the air

Has grown too thin: the world drops off

That could imagine Heaven, or so much care.

Framingham is building. The savage ring

And shake of the drill turn up your morphined sleep.

I fall, still in earth's monstrous pull,

To kiss your hands, your planeless face.

Oh, you are right

Not to know your death-bed's place;

To wander in your drugs from Framingham

To Salter's Point, the long blond beaches where

You and your brothers peeled oranges and swam

While your parents looked on in daguerreotype.

Your iron bedstead there was white like this:

And in this grave, unspeakable night,

Beyond the pull of gravity or care,

You have no place: nor we:

You have taken the summer house, the hedge,

The brook, the dog, our air, our ground down with you,

And all the tall gray children can run

Away from home now and walk forever and ever

And come to nothing but this mouthful of earth,

All endings over.