Measureless and breathless, we shrugged our dull weight
And watched the spinning azure beckon back like the floating shore.

And then the outside was as black as the darkness in the sphere
As we drifted through the space dust, as the dry land disappeared.
Then we turned

To the waning white, to the lunar light
Teeming with old words.

All around was dismal, vacant grey
That crumbled plainly in the hand.
No Atlantis, no myth on which to land.

O God, it's all the same. Is that why we came?
To burn the chariot and steal the horses?

Then I saw the sun pour in all at once
And bring the white dawn fog and resurrect the air.
I remember noise, and I remember cracks,
The white-hot boiling light, the stirring of the soil,
And foreign bodies flung, burst and gaped apart
Like the husks of fruit drinking in the heat.
It all looked the same under hands and knees:
A cityscape mirage, a brand new lunar day,
Or distending fungal growths on flayed strips of film,
Or Wild Bill burned alive on beads of coloured glass.
It took one week to dig the saplings from the earth
And thirteen hundred more before the dreams came back.