He stood howling in his night suit, rung ‘round with precipices of sleep—airy puffwashes draw as a ring toward the building he was atop. Clad in his suit for sleep, he stood and sobbed. He stood naked atop his building and sported with the airs about him. Curlicue lines sported the threaded airs—and young sports huddled through the nighted park below. Sashes were thrown, and a watch kept from every apartment, for the howler in the air—who couldn’t concentrate, or fix on a single vein of howl. Who, abed and not tired, hasn’t tried for some close stairway to the utmost verities? Attained at length, from which the view outwards...horizontality...’bleaux after ‘bleaux.
Wraith coughing naked now in the naked rains. To be glimpsed this night below by the sporters, the rabble—a drunk lyre out there snaps at an obstacle—a drunk eye raised at the tatter out on the tippentop. The ‘bleaux of the night, the night eyeless, but furnished with some thousand wings; wings at rest creased in the branches. Look up, the tearer, the roarer in his nightclothes! A distinct cry to concentration—a slink-off—a look-back—in cut-up nightclothes. He mocks his rivals in mere flowing nightshirts, he is reckless against the nights.
What does he see? The moon, and the stars were reeling in a neat ring about it. The clouds move as scenery pieces do...a ring, there is a ring of neatly reeling, wheeling, spiking stars. A written ring of stars.
-2002
