Abide, a little while longer

The silent masses of icy clouds make
in tidal scores, an island of the moon,
where an aperture forms for a few beats:
archipelagos full lit, ply all around,
growing back as one land in miraculous feats
as persistently as a sea’s waves sound.
All stasis burns up, but for the one plunked hole,
where the moon stares through and purely stains the clouds
as startle-hued as the blue heron’s back
when across both wings his steely cloud unfolds -
were his body a vase of frosted glass
that encased a white light in its core.
And likewise as the heron’s winging slow,
the flight thereof gathers largess the more -

until, like a train’s rear comes, and in its tow
naught but field landscape, the clouds’ charged passage
with the abruptness of black, will halt.
As the yanked back ocean leaves living pools,
now vestige clouds, calm as separate mounds of graves
or beached and stranded ships, still blue-lit,
sing in the dead of middle night - as heard
by those strangely out of bed, twixt day and day,
both of which are in this night interred:
the former as corpse, the latter as seed,
while eternity lays beyond and yet between
as between the clouds, in the fathomless black,
the furthest islands twinkling, the stars.