"At my age . . . what is there left to

 confront but the great simplicities?"

       -  Stanley Kunitz

A warm and sunny late May day, endless cloudless sky,

Unexpected and somehow unsettling, knowing it can't last,

And he thinks white peonies leaning against the cedar fence,

Acorns and black walnuts, blackberries, apples trees and plum;

And the way the sun always settled first in one far corner

Of the pasture, and the late years then of grass giving over

To creeping thistle and goose grass, yarrow and ragweed

And blue-flowering vetch, taking back the worn paths

The horses had made, the one path the sun made then

Grazing the white tops of clover toward the faded barn,

Painting it a deep red again, glistering on the tin roof.

 He is long and far from there now but saw it clearly,  

What had been, what it may be now, how absence had 

Grown in his remembering. then diminished in its distance. 

It occurs to him now that almost without knowing he has 

Come to consider instead the generality of common names  

For the commonplace, how they need no more definition than  

Grass, trees, fruit, wildflowers, fields along nameless roads, 

The things freely given now wherever he is; and he thinks 

It is the details that never endure; and how, in the end, 

Memories will not take him back but only farther away.