Fin de siècle

When we walk at night, the wind sharp as

cool wood splinters, we see nothing but the ebb

of our shadows from the pacing streetlights when

all at once a great black beast of a shadow

whose approach we did not hear in our study

overcomes us as a steel wire of fear is plucked within,

buzzing until we are a cold shock of edge, and we

watch the bicyclist whisper past. Or else

we do not watch: we are yet clenched in the tightness

of everything lost even though it isn’t, clutching

what we possess into our hearts and digging

our chins into our chest bones. It was warmer

back there, back in the café even though we knew

it was cold outside, or back yesterday, or back

a season ago: yes, then we walked about without socks

and once in a while ran our hands through the grass.

How we would sleep there, never to rise again,

if a single blade would push its way through

the tundra that we knew, we really knew if you pressed

us, was coming. Now there is only ice and the promise

of ice, and the sick lights that carve mirages along

the sidewalks good only for predicting the horrors

we are too frightened to turn and see as only a

bicyclist. Here is where we live, on the cusp of exhale

and the moments we we will not remember in

the peace of continuity, without knowing it because

even if our past has taught us all we will ever need

to know, we will curl beneath the shadow and wait

for the consequence of every sin that is as real

as the end of time, except that when we walk at night

only the wind is sharp, only the lights move

since only we move.