Looming as Moons of Our Own
Looming as Moons of Our Own
By Joshua Chalifour
We have torn the way over the
quickening street and
its underworlds,
through a lamp light, wet like
blood through white;
as the night air drops
like the sinuous heavens
and the eye lights on the
galaxies, deceptions make no
spinning satellites of fact;
far away suns and milky stars
of the shining sky, web
like tree twigs and branches
in green and thick,
but that's the universe
in the eye
seeing a moon as
it craters in a tenuous wink
and as the lamp fire of stars shines;
or a water jewel can gild desire
that glistens as
the metal of wheels
makes love to street traffic
—how we know and become so.
Street Lamp
By Louis Dudek 1
1 Louis Dudek, “Street Lamp,” in Infinite Worlds: The Poetry of Louis Dudek (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1988), http://archive.org/details/infiniteworldspo0000dude.
How like a moon the looming street lamp shines
through the wet tree and its sinuous branches!
Water drops wink like stars in the green light
and twigs make a web of lights in the night air
as white as the Milky Way, as thick as tenuous,
and as far away. So the eye, seeing it, makes
of a metal universe spinning over traffic —
stars, satellites, and galaxies! And the heavens
of moons, craters, suns, and wheels of fire
become the sky we know that's like a shining jewel.
But we have torn through the deceptions quickening
desire
to the underworlds of fact that no eye can gild
or love, and our own blood glistens on the branches.