Even if we have been drinking blood

From our enemy’s cranium

Inlaid with a silver torque,

Once the snow starts to tumble from the sky,

As if a galaxy were pouring its stars,

We and the panther

Are clothed in white raiment

By angels at the gates of Heaven,

Who embrace us like sublime souls

Just disembarking from Purgatory off our crystal boat,

Where our mayhem and folly evaporated

Up the flues of fiery, fiery furnaces.

Diamonds drop on our hair and lashes,

And the forest and fields are hushed and peaceful.

Watching from the last car of the train,

We see at first a sky of towers

And cut between them, defiles,

Through which flow in one direction

Red lights receding and in the other,

White lights approaching.

We thread our way through a delta of tracks,

Gather speed past cafés noisy

With Bohemians all talking at once,

Past plays unfolding before weeping audiences,

Past ballets whose wordless grace touches our hearts,

Past the libraries with their millions of lifetimes

And millions of facts marching in lines past scholars’ eyes,

Past the jazzman in a trance over his keyboard,

Softly groaning in blue curling smoke and the smell of whiskey,

Till we fly past suburbs with spacious yards

And shopping malls awash with toy cars of every color,

And then from the deepening night the great city is

A ghostly glow twinkling at the seaboard,

Manmade and diminishing,

As we hurtle into a void,

Vast and cold and dwarfing,

Like the ink between the stars.

December 28^th, 2007