Fiddler's Farewell/Therapy

by Leonora Speyer

Therapy

There is a way
Of healing love with love,
They say.
But I say no!
What! shall pain comfort pain,
Fever calm fever,
Woe minister to woe?

Shall tear, remembering,
Wash cool remembering tear?
Shall scar play host to scar,
Loneliness shelter loneliness;
And is forgetting here?

Poor patch-work of the heart,
This healing love with love;
Binding the wound to wound,
The smart to smart!
Grafting the dream upon the other dream
As a gardener grafts tree to tree,
And both from the same wild root
Bearing their bitter fruit:
The new dream dreaming in the old,
The old dream in the new—
And neither dreaming true.

Is there, I wonder,
A heaven above the heaven we knew?
And is there under
Our dream's stern waking
A sterner hell?
And shall we know them too?

One thing I know:
Of an unreckoned giving that is a taking,
A wrong, a robbery!
Perhaps you so wronged me;
I so robbed you.

Therapy—therapy—
I am content to feel
This health of heart that will not heal;
I am content to think
That I am one with hunger,
Given to thirst,
And that I need not eat nor drink.
I am full-nourished so.

They say
There is a way
Of healing love with love.
But I say no!
***
Beyond the sands
Of all they say
I see you still,
Holding toward me those eager hands
I could not fill;
My hands still curve and close,
Deeming they hoard
The shining things you poured
That I let spill.

Over us lift the years—
Hill upon hill
Of days that wither into night,
And nights that ache to day;
Reiterated emptiness of shade and light
Crowding the empty way.

Up to this sullen therapy
Of time,
Shall we two climb?
***
I am too tired to climb;
Nor would I go
So far from the loved overthrow.
Climb you to healing! while I keep
Vigil in this lost place
A little while;
Weep
If I choose,
The honest abject tear,
Let the grief break and pour;
Gather the shadows comfortably near,
And sleep as children sleep.

A little little while!
To wake and smile,
Indifferent to the dark,
Holding to me my one-time joy
As children clutch an ancient battered toy
They will not have renewed;
Smile, and lie closer to a loss
That tunes itself to gain,
(Inexorable lullaby),
Lie softer, safer,
Pillowed on fortitude—
Drowsy—
Beneath my pain.