That darkness of night,
We think about it.

When we think about it,
Night becomes anything:

The opening a man gives of his coat
Somewhere, someplace foreign—

Which is to say, it can’t happen here—
As he tries to show us French postcards,

The curious man keeping his coat
A little to himself and a little to us.

He needs a darkness for his work,
For his place in the world.

But what he shows us in there, in the pockets,
In the recesses of fabric in his coat,

In his night: the stars,
They are the French postcards

And they are just what we think—
Nudes upon nudes,

Which is to say, nothing
But nudity, and nudity

Inside there is everything. Nothing but body,
Bones, skin. But on fire.

Marrow lit up
At the end of a bone

Grasped as a torch.
Did you think I had not meant

Men as well?
They hang in some order, these cards,

An order we recognize,
Two upon one, four upon two,

A family tree
Of desires and of dares.

In the darkness of his coat there is nudity,
But the darkness last only a moment,

Until our eyes adjust. Then
The nakedness lights everything up.

The light moves from the inside of his coat
To inside us, somehow: it is a magnetism

Between light and dark, a full balance,
The way water fills a crevice.

In his darkness, his stars,
We think about them. The stars in the sky:

Who could have supposed they were fruit
Like they are, the other stars,

Fruit up in the sky, in the night,
The pears and the apples, persimmons.

This is the fruit that does not fall,
The fruit we think we never see

But which is the harvest
That comes from looking up, looking

But not looking at the sky. The way
It hypnotizes us into just thinking.

All of this is not difficult to see.
It is the empty, clean space

On a dinner plate, the place
Where apples have been, the place

Where nectarines will be,
And summer oranges and wild berries.

They are appetite, magnetic cousin to desire.
Fruit, as substantial as it feels

In the mouth,
It is just metaphor.

The postcards the man shows us,
Well, it’s nothing we haven’t seen

Somewhere in the night, in the sky,
In the stars, the millionfold stars

Which come down to be our dinner plates,
To hold for us everything we put on them.