Unpackables

A Postcard from the Volcano
      by Wallace Stevens



Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.      

Perhaps their young  minds will never know. The life that once used to be. Their innocent wonder of the mansion that once was. My Old bones leave a wake of despair. Young children fill in the blanks. Nothing to leave behind or look forward to. A dead man waits. They are the voice of the dead, he lives through their words. Consequences of a past destroyed. Re lived through thier thoughts and words whether we like it or not. Survived from a past that is destroyed. A ghost, a past, a memory: survival of the present through memories of the past. where good can come from it all.