730

Whom should I write for, dear, but for you? Two years
have passed,
The wound is bleeding -- new and will never heal.
I used to write for you, and give you the poem
When it was written, and wait uneasily your verdict . . .
but now, to whom?

As for you,
You have a better life than to read my verses.
You have gone up with the flame to the high air; and that
pitiful bone-ash,
Not buried deeply, lives in bright flowers
In the garden you loved. -- As for the precious
consciousness --
(Yours was most precious to me, not mine, nor theirs)
I think it is taken into the great dream of the earth; for
this dark planet
Has its own consciousness, from which yours came,
And now returns; as the Earth's consciousness,
Half-separate for a time, will return at length
To the whole galaxy; and when that perishes
To the whole endless universe -- that is, to God,
Who will make all things new.

But for me, here, the
momentary loneliness
Is hard to bear.

Robinson Jeffers