Throughout the course of the generations
 men constructed the night.
 At first she was blindness;
 thorns raking bare feet,
 fear of wolves.
 We shall never know who forged the word
 for the interval of shadow
 dividing the two twilights;
 we shall never know in what age it came to mean
 the starry hours.
 Others created the myth.
 They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
 that spin our destiny,
 they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
 who crows his own death.
 The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
 to Zeno, infinite words.
 She took shape from Latin hexameters
 and the terror of Pascal.
 Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
 of his stricken soul.
 Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
 like an ancient wine
 and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
 and time has charged her with eternity.

 And to think that she wouldn't exist
 except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.