Now everything carefully blank

I know this place, but it doesn't know me

Its colors so familiar bloomed from buds I was once there to see

I know this place, but it is a strange place

Estranged to me, things only we could see

are gone

But then my place is other, too

just - near.

*

"

She kept her songs, they took so little space
The covers pleased her:

Once bleached from lying in a sunny place

One marked in circles by a vase of water,

One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,

And coloured, by her daughter -

So they had waited, till, in widowhood

She dounf them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord

Had ushered in

Word after sprawling hyphenated word,

And the unfailing sense of being young

Spread our like a spring-woken tree, wherein

That hidden freshness sung.
That certainty of time laid up in store

As when she played them firts. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,

Broke out, to show

Its bright incipience sailing above,

Still promisiing to solve, and satisfy,

And set unchangeably in order. So

To pile them back, and cry,

Was hard, without lamely admitting how

It had not done so then, and could not now.

"

Philip Larkin