And how are we tonight?
The blank paralysis of the moon-soaked sky,
with stars like frags of scalp:
how dim this light, a lost soprano
hidden in the runnels of an acetate
on a high shelf. Which a three-quarters-cut
archivist forgot, and did not enter
in the book of sessions. Now urgent,
the stretcher-bearers, practised on sedans,
scuff their coffin-coloured shoes
on the pre-matutinal mud. The slam-dunk
of empty satellites above them:
their distant ricochet is a grief
concealed by the hoots of the moon.
The patient is strapped in its dark harness.