Snow circling the steeples,
one chilly boat in the bay’s dull mirror,
cold morning after Christmas,
and on the way
home from town
—old dog
hobbling in the wet,
little bursts of steps, a rest,
another, shorter burst, a rest—
I’m contemplating a phrase
quoted by candlelight
at the Meeting House:
We live
in the night of time.
Oxen in the stable, the donkey,
thick nostrils steaming,
their clear-eyed taking-in
of the god in the hay: same
open unmediated way
they see everything:
gaze unclouded by duration.
What does Arden see,
through the scratched
oil-patches of his cataracts,
limping home
in the snow-turning-rain,
old hips, slow progress
up the street from the harbor?
Isn’t the great power
of animal eyes
that we can’t read them?
And therefore something
of the dayspring about them;
all the unsayable
a part of one continuous…
My dear boy,
walking further
into the realm
of the speechless.
Night of time, daylight
of the unmeasured—
then it isn’t the darkness
that’s infinite, is it?
Imagine the sort of sky
flung over this town
Christmas Eve,
just before nightfall
(all of four-thirty, these days
when the world shuts down early
for lack of customers):
baroque evening: wild clarity
out over the harbor,
but to the south a louring
mood above a street
shining greenly
in storm-light.
And in between those two poles
—bracing, alcohol-flame blue
and that deepest sable—
stretches a shifting,
flickered, most of it, a warm plum,
brandy, had it been a flavor,
a heated flush spreading…
Maybe that’s the sort of night
time is—
rippling even as you look,
and if the whole thing races
toward darkness
first there’s this. If that’s
the night of time, Mark,
what’s so bad about that?