You tread the streets these nights
With hints of a kissed horizon.
You follow tracks you've never seen,
You chase the dreams you've merely dreamed,
You yearn for such an ecstasy
That of, you've heard but tales.
You may fashion your hopes,
You may draw them forth
From your midnight depths,
Like Phoebus draws forth the dawn.
Or like an iron curtain-
Stroking itself across your cheek
With the softness of her stepping feet.
But then, you hardly know such softness
Here.

There's a slowly drifting cloud
Your shifting eyes point out to see.
He sloughs across the sky.
And in his wisping tendrils
You think to lead your searchings,
So clinging to the earth you
Float away.
Until when, finding naught but
Again the sickness unto death,
The other voices wake you,
And you egress.

In the night of nights,
In the night of power,
The moon feels not the longing,
The bitter isolation,
Or the bending back of the heart
(Which, though moving, does not move),
Or the stutters of audacity,
Or the remorse behind the curtain,
Or the aches felt
When the bed is cold
At dawn.
It feels the path of orbit only.
And when you retreat again,
You scurry sulking,
To the books and to the pens,
To the creaking chair and the stained carpets,
To the self-consultations, then the frettings,
To the chills, then the cries:
The world is arid, and
Sympathies evaporate
Into the wind.

The Sun is risen!
As is she, the daughter
Of Grace and Sea,
Youthful and smirking,
A mocking laugh, falling
Like sugar cubes.
Her pearly manifestation
Comes lightly dancing
Tip-a-tip-a-toeing
Onto this familiar broken street,
Turns twice, looks to her left,
And hearing the bell tower
Strike right five,
She dotes a while on a thought,
Murmurs a pleasant question...
And lets her diamond eye pass your window
Disregarded, and marked not.
You let slip a great perfection.