Over the city,
from infinite heights,
falls soundlessly,
falls crushingly impalpable
and sleepily windless,
the soft and stealthy
inexorable snow.
It pads the world with silence
like an immense and mute precipitation
of some universal slumber.
And the jaded city lets its blear blurred lights go out
one by one.

A snaky far-off purring roar that grows
and grows
and grows —
a hissing smash and deafening gallopy clatter of ten thousand frantic hoofs —
the dragon train,
a wild unwinking eye of red,
a wild unwinking eye of green,
its belly full of blinding light
that blares through eaten holes in its rattling hide,
shoots
in a shrieking paroxysm of speed,
between the house-tops,
over its tense humming spider-web of steel.
And out of its clenched jaws
drips, with slithering screams,
tassels and sizzling fringes of a foam of fire.
It claws a rain of green and purple stars
out of the moaning rails,
and the houses gasp in livid fits,
convulse in spasms of terror and reelingly
dash themselves on one another
With gaping mouths and dazzled maniac eyes.

Flickering,
gesticulating,
they stagger backward from the dragon train
and close behind it like twin tidal waves
clashing —
red toppling monstrous rigid waves
with curling licking crests
of swirled whirled snow.

The snow is falling very soft and white,
Falling from infinite heights
windless and thick;
the city smothers in its frozen dreams.
And the houses with enormous wigs of snow
stand stiffened and featureless
as huge unburied coffins
upright, row on inert silent row,
in a vast deserted graveyard.

Only, receding far off,
the dragon train
howls
faintly and yet more faint
and lonely as a wolf.
And its knife-like fringe of stars
falls
sputtering through the dense and unresisting
unconquerable and soft
down-sifting infinite