Nocturnals

I start

with matter. Daylight’s grain, slag, scrap, and litter,

core cuttings of fall, apples mashed, dark drawer envelopes

gathering seed. Wherever nothing happens to the sand,

where it can settle

in the absence of vibration, it appears disposed

to pattern, as if the resined bow

were getting from the rim

a transposition, or deposition—the streaming of a mare

in gallop against the wind. Sleep, says a body,

but the ear stays on

for balance, knowing earth is both a handful and

a home. Sleep, and light is like a thing

put out at the prow. Sweeter now for being out.

Good night to daylight grain and seed. Sleep, says body,

but the ear is up, awake, at work,

to guide a dreamer’s outstretched hand,

to reach and not to fall, to feel the lichened stones

are named with names of sailors, to measure lichen’s

perfect crawl, the protracted troth

of alga and fungus,

slow and glowing as ever.

And you who are arrived at

just as slowly, what provisions have you brought

for dreaming, what’s to be rationed

in the dark, in what economy of strokes and stars?

As mica means crumb, and galaxy, milk. As every cell aspires

to the whole of the memory. A ferry comes back

without a name. A fall crossing, a summer one.

Sometimes a spring light

bare as eggs

would spread on the Atlantic.

And Orient Point

comes back. And direction, like a rake,

rakes the pebbles backward from the shore,

each radiant gray and pink a minor piece

of the dragging glass of waves.

The sequence of romance is like this, a daylight series

of unduplicated exchange. A scarf-red item

dragged through dream. Or every

shedding yellow ever hanging at the prow.

Maybe there are breaks in the series. Things we coveted

above the rest.

Because a wooden boat held gleaming fish

in flowering lantern. Because this is a feeling

that might be loved to distraction.

Say that light was there

to give away. To be put out. As kinglet, gannet,

swallow and grebe, as petrel and pelican

give a skimming weight

to water’s mapless dreaming.

As spring is part of dreams and part of winter.

As she makes the day world cold, as she keeps its granite

crashed upon, and pocked, as spring has made her living

in a welling stream, in shell and clay,

brass and wood, in brass and wood and skin

and wind, icy and free, a discipline

tacked to light,

the curious mirror, in sharing and undoing, in marking

her momentum with retreat. As a handspan

has measured a horse. As outspread arms

compose a fathom. The river bottom

seen is also leaf meal.

Not dark, but dormant gold, a torch

on the stone

of a narrow stairwell. Lake or river, body or body,

the instruments are only sylvan.

As first snow falls,

as the red-naped flicker chisels firs.

Hades fills his well with naked light.

Luminescence is the adaptation

for kissing

the sun goodbye. There’s an old dog

in that dark, a frilled shark, a living fossil

in the depths of earthbound water.

For what is lower

than engraved, who is for these regions of the dream

soul alone will find compatible—black tracts

of magnetic spherules, frangible grains

of ravishing stars, loosest

aims of clayey matter, finest bits of cooled volcanic rock,

once ledged, once sifted down, oxides of iron

and manganese, earth in total catalog without

sufficient light to read.

As Mica Means Crumb, and Galaxy, Milk