Even In the Nighttime

1.

At night as she lay on her bed in the

open

or in the tent with some of the canvas rolled

back

she could see the

sky

she watched the

sky

she watched the

stars

not for ten minutes or a quarter-hour as most people

did

but for hour after hour after

hour

even astronomers did not take in the sky with such

devotion:

for they were constantly occupied with

charting,

measurements, the fallibilities of their earthbound

instruments:

the concentration upon one or another celestial

problem.

2.

Unlike shepherds or drovers and the rough and privileged

woodsmen

who worked and slept outdoors she was seldom

tired

the abandoned stars were hers for the many rich hours of

sparkling

winter nights and unattended she took them in like

lovers

she felt that she looked out not

up

into the spacious universe:  she knew the names of every bright

star

and all the constellations and she was familiar

with

the vast billowing nebulae in which one

filament

of a wild and shaken mane carried in its tail a hundred billion

worlds

in a delirium with the humming crackling hissing of the galaxy's

edge:

a perpetual twilight, a gray dawn of heaven's many

galleries.