The streets lie somber, silence softly spreads,
between the houses drift the shadowed dead.
Their spectral bodies on the firewalls sprawl,
beneath the gaslight’s dim, funereal pall.
The shadows sweep in long nocturnal rows,
this papier-mâché town in stillness grows.
House silhouettes — a temple’s rigid frame,
burn vaulted scars into the eyes again.
A memory-book, its stanzas etched in glass,
where tear-streaked lives across the pavements pass.
In one brief glance I’m seized and drawn inside,
entombed in grief where fleeting phantoms hide.
For I could vanish, having now believed,
that life still blooms where archways half-conceived.
Beneath the paint, her melting face unveiled —
it finds me, takes me, buries me, ensnared.