Poems
Byron Vazakas
242
TRANSFIGURED NIGHT!
Schoenberg
Late coming home
through the heaped white revery
of cotton-quiet snow
blue under the arclight,
a spectral car, glass-frosted,
steams with muffied crunch
through a world empty of the human.
And the heart is suddenly
empty of the human,
and so cold, and far, and free
like the pulsing, steel-pointed stars,
that just to forget is easy now,
and not to hate, nor to decide,
as though pain were merely
a kind of embarrassment
felt for another.
If
it were really true,
this heaven of nothing,
meanmg peace,
death would be without
the brittle finality of ice,
and I no longer wait
at windy comers on cold nights,
anticipating the warm body's touch,
the animal contact
for which I risk so much,
seeing that it is against
the wishes of others.
