Time Exposures

NIGHT-MUSIC

TIME EXPOSURES

When the exposed spirit, busy in daytime,

searches out night, only renewer,

that time plants turn to. The world's table.

When any single thing's condemned again.

The changeable spirit finds itself out,

will not employ Saint Death, detective,

does its own hunting, runs at last to night.

Renewer, echo of judgment, morning-source, music.

Dark streets that light invents, one black tree standing,

struck by the street-light to raw electric green,

allow one man at a time to walk past, plain.

Cities lose size. The earth is field,

and ranging these countries in sunset, we make quiet,

living in springtime, wish for nothing, see

glass bough, invented green, flower-sharp day

crackle into orange and be subdued to night.

The mind, propelled by work, reaches its evening:

slick streets, dog-tired, point the way to sleep.

We drive out to the suburbs, bizarre lawns

flicker a moment beside the speeding cars.

Speed haunts our ground, throws counties at us under

night, a black basin always spilling stars.

Waters trouble our quiet, vanishing down

reaches of hills whose image legend saves:

the foggy Venus hung above the flood

rising, rising, from the sea, with her arms full of waves

as ours are full of flowers.

Down polished airways a purple dove descending

sharp on the bodies of those so lately busy apart,

wing-tip on breast-tip, the deep body of feathers

in the breast-groove along the comforted heart.

The head inclined offers with love clear miles

of days simple in sun and action, bright

air poised about a face in ballet strictness

and pure pacific night.

But in our ears brute knocking at all doors,

factories bellow mutilation, and we live needy still

while strength and hours run

checkless downhill.