The Armies of the Night
 
They have no speech or language,
yet their voices goes out to the world.
                        ----Psalm 19
 
The Chinese, I know now,
call it the river of light,
and in the sky
it stretched, a milky snake,
above a Southern town bathed
in nighttime’s benediction.
 
My uncles and cousins,
grown men, sat wedged
in an old black Buick Roadmaster
between the spectacle
of space and the uncertainty of talk
and patterned sky that interdicted them.