A nightgown of wind, say, its hem dragged
across the frostbitten grass by whoever wore it

in the unsolvable night, in the depth of cold,
and stars like snowflakes blown from some

cosmic alp at whose foot the clouds scattered
beneath the magnitude and chaos of the dark,

the ends of evening having come unstitched,
raveling back to the glimmer of the thimble,

the tailor’s needle poised to thread the hour
into figure, the reconciliations of metaphor . . .

Knowing one always puzzles at the universe,
what lucence, what far combustion of gases,

what confusion of shapes beyond the maples
arranged themselves as meaning in the mind?

The tenor is wily and full of shadows, sister.
It can’t quite be compared before it changes

again to the same old bewildering certainties
to which everything gets reduced in the end—

the hours themselves, say, or the honest stars,
a nightgown frayed to the emptiness of air.