Even Now

I

We’ve known it now for centuries,

that the moon is dangling by a thread

attached to heaven, hell or nothing at all.

That the thick blue paint of night

is drooping down into the streets

to wrap around you like a deep blue robe

this evening when you head for home,

dawdling ne’er-do-wells, theatre and recital-goers,

nighthawks, people who are alive,

and that the night will soon be washed away

like cheap blue ink from years ago

and afterwards the pale, pink skin

of heaven, hell or nothing at all

will shine through and no longer pale,

especially not the pink nothing like a girl’s

soft and salty sex,

and afterwards heaven and hell and nothing at all

will dry out, go mouldy and decay,

just as old loves and bad habits,

doses of the clap, faithful pieces of furniture

and bunkers from pre-1914 must die,

with no one’s help, in a corner, on a sandstone slab,

like cunning old crabs must die.

III

In autumn and in wet winters

there are days when nothing happens

in the house. Nothing except breaking the past,

like breaking a day that’s passed in glass,

like melting chunks of pond ice,

so that its number’s up, the past’s, its number is up.

But the past and today just won’t lie down,

they turn circles on a carousel, joining hands,

becoming weeks again and months and finally seasons.

There are days

that the clocks of every tower in the land

run half an hour slow

and not one of those winter people notices,

and the lost half hours, saved by no one,

ride through villages and towns, unseen, behind trams

and horse-drawn carts and clump together to form a day,

the way that snow makes a man of ice,

a day of ice for the lonely,

for whom every night is holy

like tonight.