Might it be like this then to come back descending

through the gray sheeted hour when it is said that dreams

are to be believed the moment when the ghosts go home

with the last stars still on far below in a silence

that deepens like water a sinking softly toward them

to find a once-familiar capital half dissolved

like a winter its faces piled in their own wreckage

and over them unfinished towers of empty

mirrors risen framed in air then beside pewter rivers

under black nests in the naked poplars arriving

at the first hesitations of spring the thin leaves

shivering and the lights in them and at cold April with trees

all in white its mullein wool opening on thawed banks

cowslips and mustard in the morning russet cows on green slope

running clouds behind hands of willows the song of the wren

and both recognizing and being recognized with doubting

belief neither stranger nor true inhabitant

neither knowing nor not knowing coming at last

to the door in sunlight and seeing as through glasses far

away the old claims the longings to stay and to leave

the new heights of the trees the children grown tall and polite

the animal absences and scarcely touching anything

holding it after all as uncertainly

as the white blossoms were held that have been blown down

most of them in one night or this empty half

of a bird’s egg flung out of the bare flailing branches