During December’s Death

The afternoon turned dark early;

The light suddenly faded;

The dusk was black although, elsewhere, the first star in the cold

sky suddenly whistled;

And I thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys

on roller skates

Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926,

And I thought I heard the dusk and silence raided

By a calm voice commanding consciousness:

Wait: wait: wait as if you had always waited

And as if it had always been dark

And as if the world had been from the beginning

A lost and drunken ark in which the only light

Was the dread and white of the terrified animals’ eyes.

And then, turning on the light, I took a book

That I might gaze upon another’s vision of the abyss of conscious-

ness—

The hope, and the pain of hope, and the patience of hope, and its

torment, its astonishment, its endlessness.