Philip Levine
A SPIRIT
I wakened in the dark and waited–
the moon was riding over
the great city, and when I left
my bed and parted the curtains
I could see the distant spires
black against the blackened sky,
and a shower of cinders raining
from the four huge stacks
and burning to nothing like meteors
or like those lives we must have
known before this one. I though t
of the millions of sleepers around
me, the lives I would never
enter, and how awake now, I
was the one consciousness of all.
I shivered in the autumn night,
not so much from the cold but
from the sudden sense of all
the separate lives that came
close and touched mine
as the wings of a moth
flutter against your cheek
for a momen t or the leaves
in a forest I entered once
to escape the rain . How
