The simplest memory is books by ferny windows:
When you looked up any one at all might be passing,
And most you knew. The bodies had faces.
You would see them again tomorrow again rehearsing
The same distance from bus line to front doors at the same time.
None of it was important. You could count the lives going
From eight to five and returning wasted, and they died when
it came time.
Some earlier or later, but there was always logic on the wreath.
The doors had been waiting always for their blooms,
Swinging and swinging shut by hours of the clock
On the dustless, fussy, changeless, unlivable rooms
Where the rented folding chairs were always last
To sit upon a memory like a pew
While the gilded frames on the walls leaned from the past.
Old Mr. Corwin’s derby died that way:
There, after all the Sundays of my life,
It sat on the rack and the solemn neighborhood
Went by on tiptoe. Shiny as a knife
It skulled how many years from sky to sky
To sit upon the hall rack at the end
And watch the solemn neighbors wait to die.
The simplest memory is at last their faces,
Where day by day they went repeating their years,
Past hedges and cushioned rockers on the porches,
To dry themselves on someone’s final tears.
Something had been forgotten in the public statues,
The guns were made of stone, and the tears were red.
Their eyes were kind and remembered. They died of their virtues,
And did not know the world they left was dead.
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