The sixth year in the cold hemisphere. Our friends,
on the frothy shores of home, dream we do not age,
but spin through the scrape of years
like an astronaut in her cage. Dense darkness
packed around us, snow-gritty streets
lined with lit windows, anonymous as prayer,
Berlin in the silent teeth of ice. We have filed in
with our lives, nowhere else to put them:
wooden sled we might finally use, if snow would hold,
and the child could sail down the street,
a single hour luminous and flaring.
Then sunset early in the day, and our far-off friends
turning in their alabaster beds,
as dew-skinned and young as we left them.