Thoughts on Day and Night

Everything must change now,
as I've seen Brooklyn itself,
the very face of her,
turn all the way toward the sun.

Our neighborhoods and towns -
the little places we are at -
will always arrive at daylight,
having groped their way through the relative dark
of what we call Night.
We huddle as if it has fallen,
the moon and stars a window shade pulled down in old cartoons,
the feeling that night has a smothering weight,
the pioneers who mumbled, "S'getting dark,
and best we camp here 'til the morning."

The night is not a time of day,
but only a place we've gone to:
the other side of the world.

And the light and the dark
will hold hands running in this way,
long after our fingers have stopped their tapping,
and our legs have stopped ambling Westward,
and our wounds have stopped bleeding for good.

As your body rotates in its sleep,
so that one moment, waking, you feel the heat
of your lover's breath on your lips,
and in another wake to find the cool, flat wall,
or the bedroom's mute abyss,
or a dream that is your own,
so too is the planet hurled through the void.
So too does the earth play peep-eye with its brilliant Ma, the sun.
She seems to come and go,
come and go,
but we're the ones who are turning.