In ruins lay his fondest streets,
The lamplights shine like ambergris,
The snow falls gently while he sleeps,
He wakes to find the glaring fleece.

The gods delight in stained-glass hours,
They peer through leaves of private bowers,
The winter drought, the April showers,
In May the imps behead the flowers.

The invalids will sip their broth,
And heave their blood into the cloth,
The curtains seize the gypsy moth,
It idles in the reaper’s swath.

With dreams of lonesome paradise,
His heart sails clear into the knife,
His rattle's quiet as the mice.
What is the point of endless life?

We romp upon the earth our little hours,
And do not stop to study all the flowers;
For some are parched by summer’s languid light
And others paled by autumn’s moonlit night.
The rest then by the unforgiving winter
Decease and show their stems and leaves to splinter.
But soon the ice that covers everything
Will crack and thaw and weep into the spring,
And spring will sing the coming of the flowers,
And we will pause to muse upon the hours,
And grieve and idle on the misty rocks,
And mind the meadow as it softly talks.
Then in the vernal chorus will we hear
The notes of love we knew were always there.

We spoke last month—
A bygone era.
In the park you photographed the birds:
The variety of ducks in the wetland,
The stray, courting cardinals,
And the eager chickadees that repeated
On the thin branches of the lakeside brush;
The mellow piping made us forget a minute
Of the cold February weather.

And afterwards, I told you of
What you may call the sin of love,
What I had dreamed the spring would bring:
Delivery of novel things.
The sunlight dancing off the streams,
The paths we stroll a handsome pair—
Now nothing fair is left to dream.

The steel light of evening stains the gull-polluted river.
The robins and starlings nag from the treetops, barking
Hopeless hymns to the dim and empty ether.
The stoneflies swarm and breed on park benches,
The rain-clogged swale catches dead leaves like a gutter,
And in the air the stench of spring—