My Grandmother’s Love Letters (Hart Crane)

There are no stars tonight 

But those of memory. 

Yet how much room for memory there is 

In the loose girdle of soft rain. 

There is even room enough 

For the letters of my mother’s mother, 

Elizabeth, 

That have been pressed so long 

Into a corner of the roof 

That they are brown and soft, 

And liable to melt as snow. 

Over the greatness of such space 

Steps must be gentle. 

It is all hung by an invisible white hair. 

It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air. 

And I ask myself: 

“Are your fingers long enough to play 

Old keys that are but echoes: 

Is the silence strong enough 

To carry back the music to its source 

And back to you again 

As though to her?” 

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand 

Through much of what she would not understand; 

And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof 

With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.