The Hotel in the Glen

A Daguerreotype

Here trees defend the secret of

the ruined terraces, and mossy

| crags conceal from casual eyes

the porch where my Edwardian

Aunt slipped out to keep a mortal

rendezvous. In the demi-twilight

and seclusion, walled by the

forest's steepest hills, the

Ruined hotel grows old in the tired

honor of experience. Years have

passed, but I, remembering fear's

sound, recall the thunder of a

Summer night and the revealing flashes

that disclosed the scandal of the

woodland's unrestrained distress.

It was the inscape of that time

That grief should be a muffled midnight

cry-like secret drinking in a

room-and trouble private for

family pride. There is no gaiety

Like a sad man's; and the waltzes

played in the dining room made

exterior brightness seem artificial,

seem very oddly something else,

Definite yet undefined. Though many

summers now have gone, even these

branches still seem to droop in

a réclame of weariness. Fallen

And featureless, the facade at last lost

face with the desperate elegance

of a suicide. Among. the rubble,

its fin-de-siécle attitudes grew

Slightly fixed where they collapsed,

and I, among inheritors, was born .

to a vague nostalgia ... This glen ©

is a place of missing people who

Somehow never wandered far from

home. They lived, less distantly

than we, in a landscape that they

thoroughly enjoyed. Though ruin

Indicates the pace that passed them

by, even decadence has a kind of

majesty. A sea of humming crickets

swelled beneath the stars of a

Midsummer night. Cigar smoke and the

occasional blue spark of diamonds

invented an island on the deep

verandah. Among small talk,

Well-being shored out a kind of

opulence against despair, but

like a ship's lights, accenting

all the more the darkness closing

Round them everywhere. A desperate

greatness is involved in tragedy,

the high, precarious position

leaves hold. And if their world

Fell from them suddenly, as sometimes

overnight a season falls, it was

sunlight grasping a last foothold on

leaves already leaning toward the night.