The poem begins and ends with the same three words, "away falling forever," and everything in between happens inside that fall. It isn't a plunge toward disaster, though. Jim Forest makes falling feel like what happens when you stop holding on: the night takes the speaker, and the poem follows him down.
The first stanza builds a sky out of things that are barely there. The "inky curtain" hangs from "non-existent thread" and "invisible webs," with stars glistening on them. Nearly every phrase is a paradox, as if the night can only be described by saying what it isn't. Then the imagery turns toward the human body. The clouds are "long bedsheet" and "frosted sweat," and a quiet parenthesis adds "sweet sweat / of early morning struggles." The sky is already wearing skin and rumpled linen. The poem never says what the "struggles" are. They could be labour, worry or love, and the hiss of those s sounds, with "sweet" and "sweat" almost echoing each other, holds pleasure and strain in one phrase.
Then the camera drops. "These hang over tree tops / sleeping women / sleeping men / empty beer bottles / distant roads." There is no punctuation, so the list slides. The sleepers seem to sit among the treetops, the bottles beside the sleepers, the roads beyond them. Stars, people and litter all lie under the same sky, and the poem treats them with the same gentle, level attention.
In the second stanza the night itself becomes "a woman / beautiful & black." The casual ampersand suits a title that promises "notes written in the night," something jotted rather than polished. Her hair glides "like sea gulls... across my faces." That plural is strange and worth stopping at. It may be a slip, but as written it suggests a speaker with more than one face, multiplied or unmasked by the encounter.
The most noticeable technique is accumulation. "with breasts / and lips / and tongue / and thighs / and curled hair": every "and" gets its own short line, so the reader must pause and the body is discovered piece by piece. The line break in "she presses soft within my / mouth" works the same way, leaving a small gap before the final word arrives, like a held breath. Even the coined word "in-ness" feels like language stretched past its limit. The speaker wants to be inside something, not just beside it, and no ordinary word says so.
The ending gathers the poem's senses into taste: "i am filled with salty tears brown sugared milk." The lowercase "i" makes the speaker small. With no commas, tears and milk run into one another, so salt, sugar and nourishment arrive together, grief and sweetness as one swallow. The "brown" may point back to the woman, which is an inference, but the echo of the first stanza is plain. Sweat there, tears and milk here: sky and lover are made of the same bodily stuff. Then comes the refrain, broken so that "away" sits alone on its line, a drop before "falling forever" resumes.
Nothing in the poem is rhymed, and there are no full stops. Nothing is ever closed off, and the repeated opening line turns the poem into a loop with no bottom. The central idea seems to be that in the dark, boundaries dissolve: between cosmos and skin, desire and sorrow, being held and being lost.
The dedication in the title, "For My Yes and No Catholic Worker Friends," addresses a particular community. The poem doesn't explain "yes and no," but it enacts both. There is an embrace, and there is a steady slipping "away." That reading is my inference from the text, not a claim about the poem's origins.
A thoughtful reader might also ask about the woman. She is described almost entirely through hair, body and darkness, and she never speaks. She may be more a presence of the night than a person, which can read as reverence or as a limit in the speaker's vision. What makes the poem worth studying is that it lets a private, physical moment swell until it feels cosmic, using only line breaks, repetition and a handful of exact images, and it leaves that tension unresolved.