Hart Crane - My Grandmothers Love Letters lyrics

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft
And liable to melt as snow

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter