It's a poem.
Any egghead could have told you that the moon
was in eclipse. And I, as soon
as some dog's proem
led me to consider myself one
with all the world, and the eclipse begun,
was ushered out
of euphoria to gloom, and then to lawn,
to find light clouds, and howling, and the moon
gone.
I was deceived
each way I looked, for night
laid house and bushes softer with its light
than I'd perceived
possible in the evening or by day,
and every trace or old choice of a way,
disappearing
in the not-too-far unmapped,
now lay docile and ghost-like, rapt and sapped
and quite unfearing
beneath a sky that never knew a moon.
In place of hoped despair, the bitter boon:
cloudy, and light
birdsong at three o'clock. Oh, God, a day —
the earth's come back, from not five hours away.
And where is night?
Eclipsed again by these
howls and songs of earthly fantasies.