they are the last romantics these candles upside down hearts of light tipping wax fingers and the fingers taken in by their own haloes grown milky almost clear like the bodies of saints it is touching the way they ll ignore a whole family of prominent objects simply to plumb the deeps of an eye in its hollow of shadows its fringe of reeds and the owner past thirty no beauty at all daylight would be more judicious giving everybody a fair hearing they should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon this is no time for the private point of view when i light them my nostrils prickle their pale tentative yellows drag up false edwardian sentiments and i remember my maternal grandmother from vienna as a schoolgirl she gave roses to franz josef the burghers sweated and wept the children wore white and my grandfather moped in the tyrol imagining himself a headwaiter in america floating in a high church hush among ice buckets frosty napkins these little globes of light are sweet as pears kindly with invalids and mawkish women they mollify the bald moon nun souled they burn heavenward and never marry the eyes of the child i nurse are scarcely open in twenty years i shall be retrograde as these drafty ephemerids i watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls how shall i tell anything at all to this infant still in a birth drowse tonight like a shawl the mild light enfolds her the shadows stoop over the guests at a christening 
['poetry']