I

The throb of her wordless violin, singing its hurt and joy in air,

Has not wreathed, blown, spoken aloud in the house for a long time. Now

It cries out along the walls, follows the homely spaces of the stair,

Flows, flies, runs like a wind that shapes and shakes the bough,

Wild bough, a random leafy branch all one lovely sheaf on the sky.

Sound of the singing four strings reaches me in the blue room above.

It touches red books, green books, walls. I stare at my veined hands.

I was writing. I cannot write now. A smoke of music goes over the grave

Lines of a near chair, blows wisely toward remembered ghosts of gone

But but coming back. It says they know, that I know, and the dark violin

And the long bare floors and the letters loose on my desk, how sun,

Mixed with the summer trees in our street and this night-music, gathers in

Our lives, this year in this day, this moment, and this doorway light.

It has taken them, used them for this, given these many this one voice.

There is that much shining in her. There is that much new gold and white

Sung out of the dark wood through the house. Oh be ye lifted up! Rejoice!

II

In this thin room with my worst self, unsure, un sharing, I think of time

Too much. Too many knock ring write talk to ask to add to what I owe.

But her music makes rooms more, and opens all the doors. Now I climb

Taking even them with me, carrying what I know with what they know.

And take her with me, too, since she is making believe the miracle.

III

Here where I listen is higher, more our own than our own stairs

When we went up together and alone toward love. Up here stars pull

The east west, and sky moves the pine mainmast a little in sea-airs.

Sails fill with a wind from forever. High here the house moves in a pour

Of music, night, and the world with us onward.

Oh vast design,

That needs us and seeks us in the whirlwind, and curves us out and out!

Grief searches for us, we are led by love and music. It is all the same

Song, infinite and exact, gathering the evening that the day became,

Rhyming the leaves, the boy's morning, the rattling winds, all in one

Singing and shaping, word shaping and singing life, and never done.

The cold and coming wind breathes now fresher on our son's our Lace.

See, he turns and tunes it, makes it mean whatever he needs for power.

Need slacks or tightens the weather of his music, his force in grace,

And the wind comes. It opens against my mind like a storm in flower.

He sings you in himself, his hands move more like yours on strings.

He remembers and does not remember. Not the pain. He is, and grows.

He will be tall, he is sturdy, quiet, he is our future and our fame.

This is this hour, these are the days, and the way the first year goes.

What cries to me up the stairways of my house, and climbs, and will come in,

Is what God knows, and the player, and I know. Great law without a name.