from Night Sky

White sky. Rain ices and lands as perfect quiet.You have driven days to be here. You did not expectsuch light in the ice—all through the town the hourunderstands and goes its way. Above the treeline, ceaselessly,mountains—halfway up the rock snow-steam gathersand weaves. Town be still as the day finds an order.Order understand the hour glass-white on the fields.Cars, pass the people in houses and see what littlethey live for. A breath on the window close to the face,and beyond it, wind lifting snow.

We were weightless, abalone, pulses strung into sun.We were gentle and parched, our hands tangled intwine. We slept on linen or straw, held cast-ironpans that were spinning with flame. And fed each other.And refused to offer food. How much darknesswas in us, how much green silt-sifted night?Drawn together by gravity, we held to our frames,clung to duration, wept when we lost. We understoodwe were here for a reason but could not tellwhat that was. Between awareness and stillness we sawsomeone crawling, someone laughing. And chose.

Against the white walls, black shadow-wisps of circlingbirds. Bits of ash carried on currents carried on stone.If the wind is right, the sounds of a river becomea rushing chord, then a netting of moth wings, faint-beatingpulse at the wrist. We breathe, and then are gone—disappeared into land, whose volcanic glassfeels cool to the touch. And is black, and is astral.

Terrors of night. Sickness you can’t even see.There is no almanac for the living—a pulse fliesand then stops. You are pain pinned to muscle—also grasses, breath, tree-dawns, and gears.You are dark arteries of quiet, the white heatsmashed through deserts and levers and coasts—that flickering pause between thoughts. More eventhan your own life, you flow from what is.The stars swept into stillness, the ground drinkingrain. You are the whole shape of sound.Whether or not you sing.

Desert heat rippling the dusk, neon-tuftedweeds against luminous blue. You have stoodand watched the safety in you scatter. Softening ice,carbon, pressure—close your eyes they do not vanish.Still, there are kinships of air, fountains sprungfrom fractures in earth, small veins of gold.Whole flocks floating over your hands. This isthe breathable world, which can be summoned.You do no more than feel what you have.

Time of night, time of thirst. It is too dark—the skyemptied of dusk and white nacre. But we careand have come. Devastations of attention,the helplessness we feel and strive daily to ignore—everything we will not give to one another—carries onin us always. Still the wind, which you are hearing,is soft. A train is the sound of far thunder.Hold out your arms—it rained where roses grow.Veils of clouds or breezes of clouds, magnetic stormsto the north. We are more than what we have been.More than what we most deeply know.

Power lines shine from the rain, a few cattledoze. If you look close you may see, even at night,the sun burning against small desert flowers.We have somehow remained alive, breathlessand senseless. But with the long ache of nightfallcomes permission to be still. Perhaps we listen,not knowing what we even wish to hear. Mothsin the grasses by the black path. Or smoke,or metal, the faintest scratches of night.Gorgeous wager of our lives: it is still there.The earth is no dream, but every day somethingvelvet in us vanishes. An oak’s shades of wind,sun falling in summer. We were shadows,then shadows on mist, then shadows on water.We were the presence that became at last no color.

Underground fountains and grottos, hallwaysonce lit by fires. Through the opening in the dome,sun falls on ancient stone. If you...