66 Night poems

The moon swells and its yellow darkens nearer the horizon and soon all the aluminum rooftops shall appear, orange and distinct beside the orange sun, while the diamond flares in its vacuum within. It is simple to be with the shovel, thoughtless, inhabited by this divorce, it is good the luminous machinery, silenced, waits, nice that the conveyor belts choked with sand convey nothing. When I return home to coffee at 7:45 the lithe young girls will be going to high school, pulling to their mouths stark cigarettes through Arizona’s sunlight. These last few months have been awful, and when around five the roosters alone on neighboring small farms begin to scream like humans my heart just lies down, a stone.

Not that I understand things. Angels don’t walk toward the ship, old engraving where moon throws a river of light, how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. A lot of space between them and what shines like waves. Which can’t be a choice, for angels or the engraver who was in fact Gustave Doré after sleeping off the ancient mariner Coleridge left behind under guilt and regret and an albatross’s weight. Which isn’t much, but they are big animals, four feet across counting the wind involved and rain. Doré waking to a room not really of wings. I guess a stirring, something in the black expanse he hoped to razor into the copper plate — no, a graver, not a razor at all. Beauty does terrify, a bare nothing but stop. As in angels. Abrupt. Still, to cut them their flight on metal takes a while. His hands stiff, Doré under a deadline no doubt like the small endlessly later rest of us do what we do and do until it’s not what we do. Nevertheless, angels. Why did they keep coming, one by one radiant dark of a mind paused to this most desolate given: water at night. That it floods a future not even in the picture.

What horror to awake at night and in the dimness see the light. Time is white mosquitoes bite I’ve spent my life on nothing. The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing, sitting around with Something’s wife. Buzz and burn is all I learn I’ve spent my life on nothing. I’m pillowed and padded, pale and puffing lifting household stuffing— carpets, dishes benches, fishes I’ve spent my life in nothing.

When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken, And winds of dreamy odour are loosened from afar, Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken, On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star, I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!), Whose greater noonday splendours the many share and see, While sacred and for ever, some perfect law is keeping The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.

Dormant are pinnacles and streams of the mountains, Chasms and bluffs and crawlers fed by the dark earth; Dormant are wild animals and that tribe of bees And monsters out of the sea’s dark syntax; Dormant are clans of birds with wings that envelop.

Tonight, nothing is long enough— time isn’t. Were there a fire, it would burn now. Were there a heaven, I would have gone long ago. I think that light is the final image. But time reoccurs, love—and an echo. A time passes love in the dark.

O soft embalmer of the still midnight, Shutting, with careful fingers and benign, Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine: O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes, Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws Around my bed its lulling charities. Then save me, or the passed day will shine Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,— Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole; Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

Night. Or what they have of  it at altitude like this, and filtered air, what was in my lungs just an hour ago is now in yours, there’s only so much air to go around.They’re making more people

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous Evening strains to be time’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us, Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being as unbound, her dapple is at an end, as- tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed – quite Disremembering, dísmémbering, ' áll now. Heart, you round me right With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us. Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety ' upon áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky And looks down, waiting for us to ascend ... At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net. All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star. And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.