Travelling Standing Still/Letter in Solitude

by Genevieve Taggard

LETTER IN SOLITUDE

Here are autumn certainties:I will love you and the treesGo on yellowing and the sunStand and pour its radiance down.

Count the seasonal certainties:I will love you and the treesColor like a carnival,Color and refuse to fall,To show a new aspect of treesMore nearly like themselves than these.

I will love you as I have said:After all the leaves are shed,And the sky is fastened down,And the valley depth is brown,And the ruts begin to freeze,There are other certainties.

Surely Tove you, but with noneOf that radiant tint of sun;As if a cloud had curled acrossThe sun, and clung like lichened moss;

Love you surely, but in a proneDogged way, more like a stone; As if a stone's touch gave a cueTo a clearer love of you.

However absently the eyesThinking their inner thoughts may stareThey match within, the sharpened sizeOf hillshapes in the cutting air.

And so, by seeing uncovered groundAnd outlines gaunter all the timeI see love also winter-boundAnd think more simply into rhyme.

And since love gets its tempered senseFrom the large fact of altering earth,I love the winter, stubborn, dense,And love the storm my love is worth.