The Satellite Telephone Building has no windows.
When the hermetic workers began to shrink,
the company installed lit shadow-boxes
of ideal earth scenes changing through ideal seasons,
but above them a running electric weather report
to guide the emergent in choosing the right space suit.
Twice a day they pass through their lunar windows.
No one leaves for lunch. The cafeteria
is stocked with all such pastes as prevent shock.
It is never easy, having once left earth,
to return to it. As miners, for example,
come to eye-level tensed in their dark difference.
As one night, having worked late in my cell
on Madison Avenue, I cracked a door
into a slow, soft, windless snow, each flake
the size of a candlewick and as many colored
as the neons and lamps it fell through. There were taxis,
and I had been in a hurry, but I lost it.
I walked to Penn Station through original Earth
before there were muggers, safe as untouchable Adam,
except for my sinful briefcase, and it lighter
for its fur of snow, a prime though stained by neon.
In Metuchen I walked from the station, the snow white there,
an infinite fantasy writhed through trees and bushes.
I went back once—to quit and to clear my desk
into wastebaskets, and to walk back free,
a weather on my face, the fantasies
of the possible air performing me to my kind
in an almost believable first habitat
where any one who thinks to may walk with Adam.
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