There the sun was, dying in the abyss,
in a haze of shadow, no sign of resurgence,
cooled, and cooling, slowly, dismally
toward zero, disk of lesser dark
just visible in darkness, a further
diminishment in the awful silence,
ulcers of fire under its leprous
skin. Through cracks a little of the core
still showed, as if through wreckage
in a skull the human soul leaked
into view. Trembling and leaping
from within, a flame that licked out
over the surface in each crater left
small glimmerings. The star was almost
black. The archangel, so weary
that he had no voice, no breath, the star
still writhing under his last wild look,
was dying, just as the star went out.
In cold obscurity, from Satan’s mouth
and from the star erupted burning floods,
scorched rubble, mountains smoldering, rocks
under the foam of primal brightness.
All around them, time and space and number,
form and sound, were dying into the lightless
unity of nonexistence. Nothing raised
its blank face out of the inconceivable.