In broken water trees bend
until their knees touch the ground
above the blazing and the bloody crown
of the day fading in the city’s glass flanks,
washing windows with flame
and swathing in halos faces,
such faces,
vast smooth and immaculate faces that beseech us,
but what they want takes our entire lives to give,
and even if we wrested those lives back
the transaction would remain infinitesimal
under these miles of cloud-circled red
grading into black cold,
a cold on whose far side
all is drained and incomplete
as the fading memory of an idea
that once lit all existence—
it hurts now to remember—
but still farther wavers
an older, stranger light,
and a fluttering of voices
circling at the moment of birth.
Trust me you don’t want this dream to end.