In the loneliness of my heart

I feel as if I should perish

Like the pale dew-drop

Upon the grass of my garden

In the gathering shades of twilight

    Lady Kasa

These years later, once or twice each year

When the sun has settled a certain way

As it did where the garden was, never long

But long enough now to see in the stillness

And the shimmering her bending there again

Over the flowers bending too toward the brief

Light at dusk, wet with rain or her watering,

She brushing a strand of hair from her face;

How each movement and each part of her

Was a necessary part of the garden's grace.

And how not then but now I see Lady Kasa

Plucking one pine needle from one cluster of

One branch to perfect her garden each day,

Waiting for her lover and writing her poems.

Her thirteen hundred years and my seventy,

And all the lasting beauty of every woman

I have ever loved has become such single 

Simple gestures made in one moment of time

Coming again and again, more precious now

Than then, more real than mere remembering.