I: Memory

The sunlight on the concrete glistens.
The leads are already dry.
The clouds are white, immobile, scattered
in a blue and perfect sky.

We walk down Downshire Hill past Keats's House
and on the heath we find a gravelled path that
winds through winter trees washed by a paling sun,
white winter bones so chalky that it seems they
never could have lived. We cherish the loneliness
and freedom the winter heath can give, talking
and distracted, one with one, cheating the hungry
night in this bright, bone-brittle ghost of spring.

We always have been wanderers, lovers of walls
and carefully built up places that with the
records of long centuries can penetrate our dreams
and keep our perishing at bay. Through all our
cities--London, Toledo, Florence--there runs
a net, fine interlaces of lonely plazas bleached
by sun, arched bridges, coffee, bustling streets,
lush parks and public gardens. Such entertainments
seize the mind and save the soul from ordinary time,
the dull disease that registers decay.

Where Thames and Tagus and the Arno flow
and make a Europe of a single soul, where
on vistas of the city the late sun washes
recent buildings white, or small bats, more
delicate than birds, greet evening with their
twittering, lives all that ancient pain which
art and history have given the illusion of delight.

The sun this afternoon calms us, teasing
our sluggish bodies into ripeness.
Dulled by winter rain, they seem about
to crack, like fall-set buds, into blossom.