Classic Poem

One could easily believe time
patienter than it is, indeed
that it stands still, nights
when there's no wind and it's hot
and a misshapen moon
like a clinker out of a forge smolders
in the dun discard of the sky.

Say it's three a.m. and
you're still half in some dream
condensing a lifetime's terror and despair,
and there's no sound.
And it seems things will remain so
forever — because nothing moves ,
nothing, neither moon nor cloud
nor a single peripheral star
among all the maples' opaque
galaxies (as if this were it,
the dread amber: one had entered
the past — the unalterable). . . . I am glad

I saw or felt once, looking west
at dusk, that the sun wasn't
going down behind hills
but the hills rising,
grandly, like a ship's rail, up up
till they blocked all light,
looming above us — one
vast black irregular gunwale — then
over, somersaulting us —
silos, highways and towns — headfirst
into the dark, to hang there in-
explicably not tumbling away down
into Draco and The Dipper. It

doesn't stand still, I mean.
The hills even now are clambering
at a thousand miles an hour
to smother that red ember of a moon
under such an avalanche, I
might even find an hour's peace afterwards somewhere,
or you a glimmer of romance.