Book of Night

/ /

for Collier Brown

One reads a scraping sound in the leaves, the dry
……wind summoning its rhetoric in the peach boughs,
…………and reads the strokes of moonlight disappearing

in a slender swatch of cloud behind the tree line,
……the dark pressing its petals into the book of night
…………whose many consummate erasures fail to dissolve

the sequins of fireflies, the seed pearls of the dew.
……But where does one read the thing-in-itself—not
…………the nature of mind but the thoughtless mind of nature?

Is it in the water bug skimming its dim reflection,
……grazing the lip of the bass just breaking the surface?
…………Is it in the cottonmouth’s scales, in the gator’s jaws?

One merely imagines. A few stray branches gesture
……above the crabgrass as the promenade grows quiet.
…………Any moment, something significant may show itself:

a blackbird, for example, preening in the elm tree,
……as if on the somber verge of telling what it knows.
…………Still, if the stars rattle their tinfoil over the roofs,

it comes to little. And though the far streetlamps’
……ellipses hint, in the end, at some crucial redaction,
…………one studies for nothing the words not written there.