I can only remember the night
now that the day won’t end.
Dawn has become a legend
in the memories only of we aging few
septuagenarians, early risers, archivists.
The next dusk, postponed like red shift,
may never come again.
Erev is now a word of terror
among children who cannot imagine
a sunless sky, and quake at the idea of him
slipping below the world’s lip.

It is less a change of cosmos than of mind,
as if day has become a feature
of human eyes that can no longer see dark
north west east or south.
The chariot sun reigns everywhere and lo
both poles are in ever-present glare
and around the world’s belt an unending
tropical day, and on it shoulders a cool day:
iceberg, canopy, islelet, caldera:
ebb and flow under a roving mad lord
pacing to and fro on the ceiling of the world,
from lip to lip like a word
no one can stop saying.

I can almost remember how
the universe was meant to work.
There were laws we called physics
the exchange of state, energy and mass
of which the total is conserved.
But why save now if there is always more:
light, day, blue, cloud, rain.
Neverending, like our idea
of the world to come.

Perhaps this is that — perhaps
our delusion, our hope came true.
Someone once said that if all Israel
observed a perfect Sabbath — all of us at once
a new age would suddenly dawn (and dawn and dawn.)
Maybe we did it — we humans pulled
ourselves together and loved for one day,
strangers and all and maybe even God
saw, and said to the dark:
Hoshek: be hidden.
in the memories of the old,
a new desert generation, whose minds
know night, and whose deaths we await until
this all seems normal, this ohr.

The day moon, that phantom,
is the only token we have left.
It is wise, says the day moon, to listen:
ein mazel b’Yisroel.
We shall see, she says now
(for there are no stars)
whether what we cannot imagine
controls us, or if Old Jung who
with his last words wished only for a good wine
was right about the end of time and now
we’ve become angels of a sort
as we cross the river and no longer know
our right from our left, the sun in our eyes,
a blindness as dark as the deepest night.

In my son’s eyes is only lavan,
but I think his soul has become black
clogged with mazzaroth, two hundred billion trillion stars
they had to end up somewhere.
In my own soul the world is
as it was — there is physics
There is disappointment
There is potential
There is attraction
There is envy
There is change
There is evening
There is morning,
There is day.