Reading Through the Night

Late reading, and our books dissolve

in thunder, lightning through the rain;

their lights burn single in the mind.

Your novel and my novel move together,

line by line, like Noah’s animals,

who found the ark, each other as the flood-

tide rose. Our oaky bed, its headboard

of a prow, lifts over waves. Your hero

and my heroine engage, as night whelms over

and the one great plot, that salty stew,

as ever, thickens. In a single sheet, we feel

the rise and fall of breath, the generations

that have come and gone and come again.

Is nothing ever lost? Eternal climax,

denouement: we find ourselves, at dawn,

on that bare hillside, disembarked,

the animals afoot, our novels turning

on themselves again, their separate spines.