I HAVE hoarded up memories
As other men hoard money and corn,
I have made them into rubies and pearls
For the crown of my love.
They are threads in the patterns
Of the rugs in my house,
Where beauty may feel the repose
Of beautiful things.
They are strewn across the years of my life
As daffodils across the spring meadows,
As the stars across the night skies.
When I was a tiny boy of three
My father once bought me some sweets.
How good were the sweets!
I do not remember my father.
When I grew up and was five,
I walked in the streets of Kieff,
The town I was born in,
With my brother, a schoolboy.
He was in regulation grey, with silver buttons.
I remember the grey and the silver —
I do not remember him.
Two years went by.
One morning, when I woke from sleep,
My baby brother lay dead —
But I cried for my tea.
My mother led me by the hand
To show me that he was dead.
He lay there in his small cradle
So yellow and waxen and still.
I was seven then,
I did not understand;
As I turned away —
I still cried for my tea.
Later I was nine,
I remember I played in the woods;
The sunlight was bright,
And I lay on my back
And looked into the blue.
Then suddenly —
It all comes back to me now
With the vividness of a dream —
Everything became black,
Some one’s hand drew a black curtain
Across the sky;
The wind leapt
As from ambush.
I remember I was frightened,
I had lost my way, I ran on …
There was a rumble of thunder …
I darted across a glade.
A woman ran towards me;
Her hair, loose in the wind,
Fluttered across her face.
She looked mad,
And her eyes gleamed.
She was as some distraught Fury,
Herself hunted and pursued
By the winds.
Her hair now darted frantic in the wind,
Stood out erect
Like serpents on Medusa’s head,
Reaching out to sting;
Now streamed in the wind
Like the tops of the maddened trees.
She was our housemaid,
She was afraid of storms and lightnings.
I was nine then.
I remember quieter pictures.
There was my governess,
A delicate, fragile girl
With a pale face,
Which now seems like a phantom’s.
Behind her gentleness there was fire.
She wished to blow off the head
Of the chief of police of our town.
She is dead, poor girl;
Her lungs rotted in the dank town air.
I remember her angelic, phantasmic face
As a thing remembered in dream.
And so all life passes by
In memories, pictures and dreams,
Woven into a decoration by Time’s fingers,
Which know the wonder of tragic things.
Bitter experience and pain become sweet
When your mistress is Art.
A gift remembered evokes the face of the giver,
A face hardly seen — saintly perhaps.
Life’s irony is in that memory of silver and grey,
Because no man knows his brother.
I seem even now to cry for my tea
When men are dead and are dying,
Life is a madwoman run amock in the wind,
Against a background of storm and cloud.
Here are the scene-shifters,
Come to roll up the dark curtain,
To release the sun from its place in the wings
Tragic actress once more becomes housemaid.
Or is life a sick, pale-faced sphinx,
Whose eyes only are alive
Fed by the fire of her heart —
The governess whom I remember
As the fragrance of an invisible flower?
