Leopard Light

Tonight a racing predatory moon
Flings leopard-light along a leaping sea;
Or creeps through broken wrack and thunder-gloom
On soft white underbelly silently,
Invisible as time; or like a mantle,
A fragile sphere of incandescent gauze
That thumb and finger might pluck off and crumple,
Has mere utility. . . . Among the stars
Where Being dwells beyond expedients
Her self is known (or so we speculate),
The perfect truth, all ragged facts and dents
Put down to causes, flaws incorporate.
But, goldfish-like, agape in heaven's bowl,
Perpetually staring down at us
Amazed, she in her silence says it all,
All that there is - the idols, images,
The decorous nothings out of voiceless throats
That know the need but not the pith of talk,
The worthless fact, but not what it denotes
(denoting nothing). If the dead should talk
What would they tell us more than any mouse
After the praise had all been said and sung?
Grave disquisitions on the charnel house?
Rough hints and raptures we'd known all along?
No necromantics of the seance room,
No bleak Apollo rocks can tell me why
Tonight a racing predatory moon
Flings leopard-light down thunder-brindled sky.