I

What roofs and trees of rain tonight

Between my house and yours,

Of rain and wind, of dark and rain,

Of distance, and of worse;

Silences in your life and mine,

Weather-stains on the walls,

Voices we heard and hear no more

In the high-ceilinged halls.

I've heard some here tonight,

Homely and far beyond repair

And more than ever lost

In this rain-broken air.

Here night on a Vermont farm

Like the years, the years

That gather, fade, and form;

There time with you wears.

Your cousins and my uncles dead

Who never would be old,

Those clock-collecting picnickers,

And tales told I was told

Of carriages to the Navy Yard,

Beef and business done,

Of sun that made photographs

Faded and the faces gone.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Mary.

The heavy August grapes.

That arbor and those vines down,

And those hopes.

II

Then of our age and need no more,

But Europe, rain of the world

Three thousand miles from here

On the spared despoiled,

Homeless in time, heart, place,

Thinking how to be dead,

And always behind their open eyes

All they inherited.

And the rain fell. My heart shook

Like a window in the night,

So thin against such dark 1 thought

I must put out the light,

Put the light out and run away

Up the steep stairs to bed,

Up miles and miles of past and dark,

And bury my head,

Hurry the world to bed, to sleep,

And sleep the night away,

As if to keep, as if I could,

Night from being day,

Or the day from being bitterly so,

Or world under the sun

From turning over, turning over,

As it has always done.

I stood stormed in a dark room,

Could not what I must do,

Or said in wind and dark I could not,

And thought of you.

III

In pain, your courage cried of pain,

With courage yet to spare.

So much of both, more than enough

For hurt anywhere.

On a night like this, when thunder

Cracked my childhood sky,

I sobbed for the roof, the world.

It stood. I did not die.

Nor you. You called it the last storm.

It would break winter's back.

And morning came, and sun, and spring

To confound the almanac.

IV

I remember a picture of you young,

In brown furs, not tall, among

People I knew when they were old.

I thought you always young.

Time's mirror in my dark room

Gives me back with love

The same face from your shadow now

That your morning gave.

Behind you wander leaves,

And fields of sun, my father there,

And all the years before I was,

Of that old-century air,

He young in the high world

And all your summers green,

You small and smooth and secret

Of something seen.

V

When I married, I caught up

On the history of the heart.

I stepped into your generation,

That welcoming fort,

That house you kept house in

While I was a child.

Now I am in my open door

Standing, and growing old.

Fond, and kind, and faithful

By a habit of the heart,

You keep with your own quiet

The world from falling apart.

But the world runs down, dust

Falls, the young become the old.

You learned that long ago,

And hold all you have held.

I am my father, and have a son.

Our voices sound the same.

Troubles we may not have alone

Are spelled in our name.

Your face was bone and width your own,

But half of yours is mine

To stare with at a world not wrong,

Not right, hut by design

A clearing, a clouding tree of stars

That put down roots and grew. I live under its shine and shade,

And can what I must do.