For Catherine

So Stevenson be glad—
Whatever your life was, your dreams were,
I do not know and you cannot care,
Fallen like a stone on that hot street.
But I shall never think 
Of Silenus rising from the wheat
Save coupled with your death. 

Seeing her, with those first rude playthings,
The world growing large in the veins of a leaf,
I shudder. I grow old in her budding years.
She cadences my life with moth-like breaths,
This frail glory that measures ceaselessly my doom,
This child. But, humbly, we do as we must:
Send new shoots into a forest we shall never see.