Excerpt from The End Of The World

I. Terra Nova

The place without associations--
Where, in another country, there were mountains
so the mind was made to discover
words for containment, and so on,
here there was water, an extension of a brilliant city.
As for detail: where there had been, before,
nurturing slopes of grass on which, at evening or before rain
the Charolais would lie, their many eyes
affixed to the traveler, here
there was clay. And yet it blossomed astoundingly,
beside the house, camellia, periwinkle, rosemary in crushing profusion--
in his heart, he was a lover again,
calling now, now, not restricted
to once or in the old days. He lay on his back in the wild fennel.
But in fact he was an old man.
Sixty years ago, he took his mother's hand. It was May, his birthday.
They were walking in the orchard, in the continuous present,
gathering apple blossoms. Then she wanted him to watch the sun;
they had to stay together as it sunk in the possessive earth.
How short it seemed, that lifetime of waiting--
the red star blazing over the bay
was all the light of his childhood
that had followed him here.

--Louise Gluck