The Moon and Constellations

None of the cliches will do it: like glass: like crystal: pure
As the driven snow. But what can you say? Branch tips
Freeze into this air, inseparable from dusklight
As capillaries from flesh, and as incomprehensibly patterned.
Maybe that’s a cliché too. It’s five below zero, and due

To get colder as the sun drops. Maybe that’s a fact.
In this weather, the world clarifies itself: it’s a record winter,
And things are hard. All over town, cars slide
Downhill backward, spin against the way they drive.
You can hear them whine, then cough: see headlights darken

At streetside as batteries die. It’s physical law
Turned ugly in the middle of Main Street. But I’ve driven out.
On this road nobody has traveled before me since snowfall
And the temperature’s sudden plunge, I hold my own
Way steady, and watch the light take on a clarity

I’d call luminosity if I weren’t already talking about light.
There is no word for the difference. Driving home yesterday,
I did not see how hard and separate the elm boles jut
Out of each others’ shadows, how when crows jerk into the sky,
Wary but not frightened at my passing, they seem to take

Permanent shape in the nameless color of what is not
Day and not night, but something entirely other.
That’s a fact, but it may be false. There are false facts,
If a fact is a way of saying something that makes it sound true.
The fact is, the world is the same as yesterday,

Only colder, that’s all, and what I want to see
As a visionary difference is only a difference in vision,
In light that makes me focus on the boundaries between things,
Their dark and believable presences in the air of almost-night.
I round a curve slowly, see the lake through a gap in the trees,

That weeks-frozen stretch of featureless dead white
I have watched every day, suspicious. Its moonscape
Is unreal to me. Once changed like that, something deep
In my body tells me, it is capable of anything. And yet
I could walk two miles across it to the other shore.

This is the physical world. Hours from now, in the dark,
I will come here again on foot, my ritual night walk: I will stand
On the side of this road, overlook this lake,
And it will be the same road, the same lake, however half-visible:
I will come here from my cabin, with its fire and its reading light:

Will hesitate, as the white of my breath obscures what remains
To me of vision, wanting to know I am standing on the edge
Between true and false facts, between myself and the world,
Between landscape and inscape in the abstract
Moonlight, believing, not believing, come with my separate mind

And body to walk the diamond clarity of what is not
Snow and not ice but another substance partaking
Of two states of being, two names, two truths. But I’ll find,
As I have always found, that when I lift my hand
Against whatever shatter of moon there is, to block that light

So the permanent pattern of stars can come to me clearly,
It is only my hand I’ll look at, its five-pointed shadow
Hung there among the mythic orders, cliched as all
The rest, and maybe no realer, but more loved
By the people I love, who, loving, hold it blindly

To the one great law of the physical,
The body, which appropriates everything.