me when i wrote that i would have a monument as for a demigod - whatever that might be - when i will be lucky to be buried as the poor are buried; without noise, and the faces covered, and be gone as the year goes out, and be honored as a blank wall in a cold chapel of the church where i shivered as a child beside my father, the judge in his complete black. those years when soldiers clattered and clanged through the streets, horsemen clashed under the windows and the nights rang with the screams of the wounded outside the walls, while the farms burned into dawns red with smoke, and blood came spreading through the canals at the foot of those towers on the hill that i would see again after every absence. fingers of a hand rising out of the gray valley in the distance and coming closer to become here as before, where my mother wanted me, where i married, where the banquets glittered along the river to my songs — where my daughter died, and how cold the house turned all at once. i have seen the waves of war come back and break over us here. i have smelled rosemary and juniper burning in the plague, i have gone away and away, i have held a post in rome, i have flattered evil men and gained nothing by it. i have sat beside my wife when she could move no longer, i sat here beside her; i watched the gold leaves of the poplars floating on the stream. long ago, the gold current of the river pactolus was compared to eternity, but the poplar leaves have gone in the years when i rode to aurillac. i used to stop at a place where the mountains appeared to open before me, and, turning, i could still see all the way back to here, and both ways were my life, which now i have slept through to wake in a dark house, talking to the shadows about love.