Then as now, and all sorrows likewise.
Heat fell through the colorless window
Since replaced by random rainbowed bits
And sank through my breathing, pulsing chest.
It was as true thirty years ago
As more than a century ago,
As it was thirty minutes to now:
Prayer carved the sable flowers, chorals
Spun rose windows in the aisle, music
So silk long by arch and colonnade
That these lines trembled out and followed.
Body recalled the industrial
Cathedral blackened and scaffolded
Even after seven centuries
Of planning and building and bombing,
Incompletion and restoration
Marking an eternity of change.
And body was dreaming in the sun,
Only daydreaming to the last breath
Played in the wheezing chords with pauses,
Longer and longer, that cliffhanger,
Der Abschied. The clear glass was windshield
Not high windows. The sky was over
Desert mesas not smoking city,
The memory of the cathedral
In the poem, the chords, the pines, the snow.
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