Translucent brown and amber ought,
through thousands of a thousand years,
be finely cut and kingward brought,
but this perfect, humble, sweet sweet candle,
she lit it just for me.

We live not within the splendor, the world the world adores,
we live among the many things that things alone could savor.
We live among the wood, with oblong corners and nails and knots,
darkened grains are stories formed within the lofty, lumbering lots
and nightly lighted on our wall; our own short lives
do but despise the time the lines remind.
But this candle – see the candle, see her light it just for me.

A carpet floor, a carpet warm, a carpet that we found.
Before our door, the words make clear: you are not welcome here.
There is only so much carpet, see, the world to go round;
if we guard not goods and places found,
we haven’t the wealth to buy it.
But notice now a cinnamon smell, an odor over the musk,
over the dust, the pine, the reconscu alofting in the air –
we smell the sweet smell of the candle now,
that she lit just for me.

We live amidst the spiders,
up in their corners, hiding away,
patient and dinner will come-
We live in plain things, things that are what they are.
The robes we wear are fashion-free
and warm against the cold,
and the does often, unbidden, come, with the dampness
and the brute-strength boars of sickness, death,
But there, the perfect candle, she lit it just for me.

Close together, we warm our hands, on the body each provides;
these hands – was it these hands? These hands, they do not cry –
they haven’t the memory – time slips by unrattling, for them.
But I remember, I looked in the candle, that she lit just for me,
and I thought, “I should leave, to go outside,
the trails out there to walk,
to find the place where I have not gone – before I too have died.