For me there is a secret on the western slope, Where the last pine has stabbed the sunset through And that slow red still drips upon the dark; For me there is companioning along the skyey plain When no sound is, save little hurried feet of stars Homing before the barking wind. Night is a sheath for that stript blade. Night is a kennel for old shepherd Wind. Night must be hearth for me and my remembered dead: (No nearer can they come, in these dim later years, Than on this fringe of hills in winter dusk . . . And I, alone in this desolate dreamy valley, Am one with its drift of reminiscential snows.) O Dear-and-Gone, in vain I reach and call -- @3Or have you heard?@1 Beyond the silence of the steep, Listening across this twilit frontier of the world, You who have left my heart pines and the stars? |