Intergalactic

Nor glass nor stainless steel now comes between My wide eyes and their vision steeped in sleep – Of things that live yet live divorced from life.

Could I, a child of ponds where water forms And plants wave, prosper in this lovely death?

Perhaps in cold so perfect that time stops And matter disappears, the tender void Would bend to nurture life in rippling pools Of hydrogen; would pause to touch her lips To polished quarried slabs of frozen air.

The black where dust chokes off far starlight seems As real a thing as blue-white spark of stars; This silence freights slight whispers, and the knife Of space itself cuts soft as a cocoon.

From The Elven Lands by William Illsey Atkinson.