The Night Sky

DAVID SHAPIRO

THE NIGHT SKY

To look up in your face

Is like looking into the devastated night sky

Lights of all kinds I trace

Animals, battles, the whole picture rotating by

Now the nervous system is suspended

Your total mass enjoys recuperation

In repose our theories are almost ended

You are inert as Eve in hibernation

The sailors go to sleep, and then their sails

And then a dead ocean falls upon my mind

I think of grapes put to sleep or apples

Kind apples and night's welcome officer wind

Let us return now to your hair

So long and inconvenient

Fixed to you and waving like that slowly rotating star

Swept past one's vision to make a point

Sharp flashes of those eyes show you once a week

So well within the behavior which is yours

Deliberately trying to find someone else in the universe

awake

Life, a long way ahead of ours

Your body is no bigger than the earth

Dreaming outside the sudden switch of the sun

Sending off attached clouds as little worth

And twinkling your closed eyes: their work is done

But not your lips triumphantly open

Musically since the ear is ready

Weightless as a knife in air will sharpen

And the billiard ball grow giddy

I would thread with a hook and eye your dress

Fasten you to me with a rod or bolt

Pass through like a curtain rod your eyes

And they never shut

You are relative to the distant stars

Not smeared out to a lump, a leaf

A lot of annihilation is going on, you cut your hairs

But the hair grows back and not the knife

We are fixed at both ends forever

In the frequency of the fundamental cave

Holding us is a musician however

Like a string and like a wave