A night of stargazing turns out to be about something much closer than the stars. Reuben's "Chase" begins with a cold sky and ends with a person: it opens on the word "Together" and closes on "you". Everything in between, the dancing stars, the huge moon, the slow slide from black to blue, works as a long, patient approach to that last word.
The first stanza sets the bargain of the evening. The night is cold, the sky is "brilliant," and the speaker decides that "shivering" is "worth it for the view." The shiver is physical, but it also hints at the small discomforts people put up with to be near someone. The second stanza moves from observation to invention. The stars "dance slowly to an unheard song," a good image because it is both visual and silent. Stars barely seem to move, so the dance is a slow one, and the music exists only in the watcher's imagination. The lines that follow, "No step taken is right or wrong / Once started, all the dance will follow through," give the night a loose, forgiving feeling. Nobody has to perform and nothing has to be decided. The night will simply unfold.
In the third stanza the camera turns from the sky to the companion. The moon is "cold, large," and it lights "your face." The speaker then says, "I know your mind is up in space." This is the quietest and most interesting moment. The two are side by side, but one of them has drifted off into the sky. The line can be read as affectionate, since the speaker knows this person well enough to read their daydreaming. It can also be read as faintly wistful, since the speaker is the one watching rather than being watched. The poem doesn't say which, and that ambiguity gives it depth. The stanza ends on a change of colour, "black to navy blue," a delicate way of showing hours passing without mentioning a clock.
Then comes the shift in tone. The sun "brings the dawn," and the lyrical register collapses into a joke: "We fell asleep on our front lawn (oops)." The parenthesis feels like a spoken aside, and it brings the poem down from the cosmos to a patch of grass outside someone's house. That drop in scale is the poem's best trick. The night began with stars and ends with a lawn, and the speaker doesn't mind. "But at least I got to spend the night with you" is the plainest line in the poem, and the modest "at least" suggests the speaker is quietly pleased, perhaps more than they want to say outright.
The sound of the poem supports this. Each stanza has three lines, and in every one the first two rhyme: night and light, song and wrong, face and space, dawn and lawn. The third line breaks away, but those third lines all end in the same "oo" sound: view, through, blue, you. The rhyme therefore runs underneath the whole poem like a refrain, and it builds toward the final "you." It also echoes the poem's own idea, that once the dance is started it will "follow through." The rhythm is relaxed and conversational, not strictly metrical. Lines are of uneven length, and the last one is long and unhurried, like a sentence said aloud at the end of a tiring night.
The title is the one puzzle, because nothing in the poem is literally chased. One reading is that the sun chases the night away, since the poem is built around the sky changing. Another, which is an inference rather than anything the text states, is that the speaker is quietly chasing the attention of a companion whose mind is "up in space." Either way, the title adds a note of motion and longing to a poem that is physically still.
What makes "Chase" worth reading is its honesty about where the feeling lives. The stars are spectacular, but the speaker's real reward is the company, and the poem lets us discover this by joining the speaker in the cold, the dawn and the slightly embarrassing lawn.