Santa Fe

Santa Fe

It is the hovering time,
moments made to bear defining.
Someone should declare when it is night;
the dear white ghosts slip down the corridors,
wordless, in and out of rooms
as if the walls did not exist— and commerce
is a strange and other-world imagining
fading quite away, just after eight o'clock.

Sound is sacrilege, gesture frames the hour.
And from the morgue below, the cart is bound
for 722; there is no one to weep.
There was a prayer a little while ago:
"You know, of course, dear lord,
I have the promise of my son...
that he won't let me die alone up here...
and in the dark."
~