“We sat within the farm-house old, / Whose windows, looking o’er the bay, / Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold / An easy entrance, night and day.
“Not far away we saw the port, / The strange, old-fashioned, silent town, / The lighthouse, the dismantled fort, / The wooden houses, quaint and brown.
“We sat and talked until the night, / Descending, filled the little room; / Our faces faded from the sight, / Our voices only, broke the gloom.
“We spake of many a vanished scene, / Of what we once had thought and said, / Of what had been, and might have been, / And who was changed, and who was dead;
“And all that fills the hearts of friends, / When first they feel, with secret pain, / Their lives thenceforth have separate ends, / And never can be one again;
“The first slight swerving of the heart, / That words are powerless to express, / And leave it still unsaid in part, / Or say it in too great excess.
“The very tones in which we spake / Had something strange, I could but mark; / The leaves of memory seemed to make / A mournful rustling in the dark.
“Oft died the words upon our lips, / As suddenly, from out the fire / Built of the wreck of stranded ships, / The flames would leap and then expire.
“And, as their splendor flashed and failed, / We thought of wrecks upon the main, / Of ships dismasted, that were hailed / And sent no answer back again.
“The windows, rattling in their frames, / The ocean, roaring up the beach, /The gusty blast, the bickering flames, / All mingled vaguely in our speech;
“Until they made themselves a part / Of fancies floating through the brain, / The long-lost ventures of the heart, / That send no answers back again.
“O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned! / They were indeed too much akin, / The drift-wood fire without that burned, / The thoughts that burned and glowed within.” — The Fire of Drift-wood: Devereaux Farm, Near Marblehead by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
One last fire, slowly dying in the grate. A warm glow still takes the chill from the air and from the lone figure sitting directly in front of the hearth.
The words of Yeats….”When you are old and grey and full of sleep, / And nodding by the fire, take down this book, / And slowly read, and dream of the soft look / Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
“How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true, / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
“And bending down beside the glowing bars, / Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
There are faces in the fire tonight..
***
Don Jackson
