On Waterloo Bridge at night

December 9, 1986

Come lean against this parapet and look! The cityscape is spread across the sky. ``Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie'' like pictures in some huge, nocturnal book. The city glimmered in the morning sun, its marble, stone, and wood transformed by light that we had thought would go with coming night. We watched the river's glitter fade and run as if the tide took brightness from the day, and all dissolved and flowed with time to sea, but then the city's lights returned the spark and joined the evening's brilliant Milky Way, for tattered sheets of night have rents to free the starlight that ignites the heaven's dark.