NO MAN'S LAND

The city was becoming
yellow and weary
like a sad ox.
The mist
was slowly penetrating
the long alleys.
Wretched little city, remote,
municipal, dark.
We did not know
what to do
with life
so as not always to return
with nothing in our hands,
like divers in the void.
Unfinished words or impossible
signs.
Adolescents in the reverential
order of families,
and the solemn dead.
Monday,
Sunday, Monday.
Rivers
of loneliness.
Long trains passed
with no destination.
And the mist came down,
lapping the clearings,
darkening the cold.
Along the long alleys I had strayed
from the enclosure of childhood, now bare,
cut down, walled up by absence.