Nightime in the City.

Here there are no moons to travel
midnight skies; cutting
clouds like a buzz-saw; making
stark outlines of doomed
elms on pristine snow.
Stars do not twinkle in this place.
The dots of light that have
travelled for centuries
cannot penetrate the blush
cast into the sky by the lights
of the city. Sometimes,
when I am all alone, which is often
lately, mostly by choice, I can
travel back to moon-raked
starlit hills of winter near
an eastern shore and
feel again the gentleness and
wonder that we knew
before our love became
one more routine, another part
of the rhythm that we let
carry us through loneliness
to our graves.