As oil is aghast on any surface

first the messenger part of the sky ran

to the bishop part and spoke in uneven tones,

the night was pronounced a trainwreck

from which every body had been thrown clear

and was walking around, stunned to be unhurt,

looking for where all the violence was:

lodged overhead in the dawn sky,

in its fertile cracks, orange untiming the black.

And as it spoke of dawn the messenger became

less true or more sound filled the air

and ran along the ground like hair under water,

in the nervously rehearsing patterns of traffic,

and as it went on clearing speech with the bishop

it became less of a messenger and more of

a rose drying out of sight, a fragrance,

until there were no parts at all in the view

only a laborious frankness bigger than ever

hung everywhere in the quillcolored sky.

A desperate idleness played in the shafts,

a milky bluish luster, the source of clouds

and other fast makings that would trait the day,

the wrong and pleasant taste of its battery

a thing so young even its hopes are bitter,

with a fearless quality as of a bill

unfolding in the warm and penniless hand,

being before the authorities, relaxing again

against the certainty of their punishment

like rough cloth when lying on a guestbed.

Long after the eyes have reclosed

to get indifferent to another hour of sleep

there's this slinking sense of abandonment,

the hole in the side of a hill, in morning

spent ignoring the need to get up.

Even as its faintness is left behind

the dawn still beats, a blue bosk

to mark the day's increasing heaviness,

there is nothing to forgive or demand of it

but it remains, a shameful, bodiless memory

unable to feed on the spinning of the earth.

The thought of helping it collect is an illness

that one has heard about before but never seen,

now it moves out of those tenuous preserves

and waking occurs under a standard, effortless sky,

living like a difficult involvement

that dies often but refuses to go away.   

But the rose had been there, a dawn observation

that leaves a hole in the later sky; the sky

that goes on looking even more than ever the same,

rising through a reacquaintance without sound,

without appetite, constantly redrawing…   

the body beneath it now a throbbing shield,

a sack, a weed in a ditch, baffled and warm,

a time that couldn't get comfortable...

but the rose, the dawn, the two men speaking

through the poverty of a blush....

And then it's midday, it has been for years

and yet is just occurring, featureless miles

without coastline or balcony.

There is no thought of sleep in it,

there is no place to start or rest, it is,

just as an afternoon is a dry jarmouth,

upon examination a little wider at one end,

where looking becomes a kind of waiting

for the day to close, for the eye won't,

an eye from which the rest of the body grows,

and the clouds come out like workers from a mine.

                                                                                   —Geoffrey G. O'Brien