Ah, many, many are the dead
Who hold this pen and with my fingers write:
What am I but their memory
Whose afterlife I live, who haunt
My waking and my sleep with the untold?

My sight with the clouds’
Unimpeded rest in changing moves
Across the sky: the aged in endless
Unbecoming are at peace.

I could have told much by the way
But having reached this quiet place can say
Only that old joy and pain mean less
Than these green garden buds
The wind stirs gently.

In the high lonely hills
Long ago astray: why
Did the great merciless winds
Fill my heart with joy?

What have I to regret
Who, being old,
Have forgotten who I am?
I have known much in my time
But now behold
Procession of slow clouds across my sky.

This little house
No smaller than the world
Nor I lonely
Dwelling in all that is.

Young or old
What was I but the story told
By an unageing one?

Into what pattern, into what music have the spheres whirled us,
Of travelling light upon spindles of the stars wound us,
The great winds upon the hills and in hollows swirled us,
into what currents the hollow waves and crested waters,
Molten veins of ancestral rocks wrought us
In the caves, in the graves entangled the deep roots of us,
Into what vesture of memories earth layer upon layer enswathed us
Of the ever-changing faces and phases
Of the moon to be born, reborn, upborn, of sun-spun days
Our arrivals assigned us, our times and our places
Sanctuaries for all love’s meetings and partings, departings
Healings and woundings and weepings and transfigurations?

Bambini picking daisies in the new spring grass
Of the Boboli gardens
Now and now and now in rosy-petalled fingers hold
The multitude of time.
To the limits of the small and fine florets innumerable of white and gold
They know their daisies real.

Botticelli with daisies from the timeless fields of recollection scatters
That bright Elysium or Paradise
Whose flowers none can gather,
Where spirits golden immortal walk for ever
With her who walks through spring after spring in primavera robed,
Ripening the transient under her veil.

Not that I remember, but that I am
Memory, am all that has befallen
Unbroken being and knowing
Whose flow has brought me here, laden with the forgotten
Times and places, once here and now
Of those who were, from day to day,
From life to life, as I,
Presences of that omnipresence without end or beginning,
Omniscient through our being,
That brings and takes away the unremembered living
Moments of joy and wisdom, the once-familiar
Rooms and temples and fountains, the long-ago gardens
Of a thousand summers, music once heard,
Travelling through me and on, like a wave
Of sound, a gleam
Irrecapturable. And who are we
Who gather each one leaf, one life of the myriadfold tree
Of the lost domain, and mourn
The flowing away of all we never were, or knew?
Promises, messages reach us, instruct us,
The untold, the untellable, undying
Heart’s desire, resonance
Of elsewhere, once, some day, for ever.