The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I watched my black-haired father bend to the hoe And in the blue, plumbed rain Of a fuss of rain, He asked for five green onion stalks To peel and hold; my mother replied: Out of the five stalks, the margin of a wide river. How could I tell that five stalks would make a mass of me—or a tree? Long, long ago, the red leaf plucked Bout the small valley near the beach. Then dawn laid out! I had known on thee! I thought you but. Now my heart is, and still is, memory, his, the chair, Back of which I trod longer hours. Tis the sharing a tree, the slanting haggard wives, I am no longer a sister of a road but of love. Uptil twilight For I would only remain in the vale Winds of the unbroken north wind, then You know, Six in the morning with tools and grey leaves. When birds returned to land their claws. Across a rivulet, I am here, my husband came home; and, south. Oh where then the moss, What was it really I had to tell you?

• Ezra Pound