the habitation of the blessed

"the spheres milky and rose, crystal and gold, clanged one against the other in the darkness,

for they were as blind as they were bright.

the sphere of heaven ground slowly through the windy pitch, and crushed against

the benevolent silver of the sphere of the moon.

all along its rose-coloured meridians, the orb of heaven cracked, and splintered, and shivered.

lines of gold like fire appeared in its great face; glass formed and bubbled in long rivers, and in the beginning of everything it cried out as the sphere of the moon passed into the sphere of heaven.

where the moon had entered, so the sun followed, and mercury lined with quicksilver, jupiter hot and moist, and all of the planetary spheres and elemental spheres, one after the other like one of ikram's poor dolls.

the crystalline heaven swelled with all it contained, and lost all its rosy colour, becoming instead the colour of black glass. thus when we look upward in the evening, we see the very furthest rim of heaven that can be seen from where we stand, on the last and smallest and best of the spheres,

the habitation of the blessed, our own dear earth."

excerpted from "the habitation of the blessed; a dirge for prester john volume one"

by catherynne m. valente