1. 

Late at night, the kids in their rooms come 
drifting towards me, thinking of home, perhaps, 
wrestling a kiss fire of pain. 
And the ward is yellow with breathing, 
the bedsheets blue; fast, slow movements 
taming the black to their faces. 
What they don’t know are which facts 
open a window, who is to die, 
which dying has nothing to do 
with their bodies, their faces melting 
into fact, the sense of trees. 

2. 

The people that walked in darkness 
have seen a great light 
which He saw first, being God, 
on the metaphysic beaches of light, 
and slept, and when He woke, walked again 
in this light daily over Sienna, daily 
above the white houses. 
And they that lived in the shadow of death, 
upon them hath the light burned. 

The hills of Sienna in 
the light darkness of evening 
a circle, in perpetua, were a good idea — 
internal, clean, rising like a moon — 
and what a good idea, coming 
as it did when I wasn’t alive, 
nor yet dead, burning.