This evening, a vast open sky, abstract, supernatural,
cold with stars, infinitely inaccessible
to human prayer, a vast open sky emerges
to fix in its mirror visible eternity.
The frost grips this infinity of silver and gold
the frost grips, the winds, the silence and the shore,
and the plains and the plains; the frost that bites
the blue distances, where the stars point their lances.
Silent, the woods, the sea and this sky so vast,
its motionless glimmer darting across,
and nothing to disturb the primal process,
this reign of snow, bitter and corrosive.
Immutability complete. You feel the iron tighten
and vices close on a heart mournful and open;
and you are seized by the fear of an immortal winter
and of a sudden mighty God, glacial and splendid.