way-station (for Gr---)

as sun-arrows driven into the leathern skin of the great cold world
your summer laughter to the glaciated surface of me
like folded glass blown from the distant thunder of half-remembered joy
the pulsars shining out at the corners of your dancing eyes
and the soundless unsmiling wasteland of me is struck blind and for a fool
by the imagined remembering of innocences
and by passions never to be known
never to be rendered better than the baldest of lies
never to know the terrified perfection of instant's realization
of worlds touching at the lips
of gazes intersecting not as those of friends
but as those of two road-wearied travelers only incidentally reposed at this
the same way-station
a thousand years into the bad country
over the border separating what is real from what is right