Daylight, the poem insists, is "simple stuff", "orderly", and the speaker wants none of it. Whatever he is after can be found "only in the sky of chaos / in the summer night". The opening sentence is oddly unfinished. We learn where something is not and where it is, but never what the "something" is. That gap is the point. The poem is about a kind of seeing that only arrives once tidy daytime categories fall away, and the next three stanzas show what it looks like.
It looks like a collage of things that shouldn't share a sky. The Hale-Bopp comet, a real comet that was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, is "creeping / between the stars". "Creeping" turns something enormous into something slow and almost sly. Then comes the strangest link in the poem: "the hands of the clock continue / the muezzin's calls to prayer." Cosmic time, mechanical time and sacred time are laid side by side. "Continue" suggests the clock does not interrupt the call to prayer but carries it on, as if the hours themselves were a kind of devotion.
The third stanza brings in the modern world with a jolt. "White airport light / blocks the apricot in the southeast." The harsh, artificial white is set against a soft, fruit-coloured glow. The poem doesn't say what the apricot is, but judging by its position and colour, it may be a glow on the horizon being drowned out. Then the syntax slips: "dumbells of death like black cherries / are kept from kissing." This is the hardest moment, and I read it as an inference rather than a certainty. A dumbbell is two weights joined by a bar, and cherries hang in pairs, so both images suggest two dark shapes almost touching. Death is heavy and also sweet, something you might eat, and the "kiss" is held off. Who or what does the holding off is left open, though the stanza's placing makes the airport light a possible culprit.
The form supports the meaning. There are four quatrains of short lines, with no rhyme and no regular metre. Punctuation is almost absent. The first stanza has none and spills over the stanza break into the second, and full stops arrive only at the ends of stanzas two, three and four, with one semicolon inside the last. The effect is of a long, unpunctuated gaze upward. The poem's grammar refuses the "orderly daytime" it rejects, so the argument is enacted as well as stated.
The last stanza changes the angle completely. After comet, clock and airport, we get a person: "I stride bootless bragging / with ugly toes turned up." The comedy is deliberate. "Bootless" means barefoot, but it also carries the older sense of "futile", so the bragging is hollow as well as bare-footed. The hard b-sounds make the swagger audible. After so much cosmic material, the speaker undercuts himself with his own ugly toes.
Then comes the closing turn: "through my shadow in shallow water / you see the summer marsh." The sounds soften into a hush of sh and s ("shadow", "shallow", "summer", "marsh"), and the poem suddenly addresses "you". The speaker's shadow is not a dark blot but a lens, and he becomes something to see through. We end low down, in wet ground, after beginning among the stars.
That movement is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats the sky as chaos, but it doesn't try to tidy that chaos into a single message. It lets comet, prayer, airport glare and death sit together, then brings the grandeur down to a barefoot, boastful, slightly ridiculous human being who, by being transparent, lets the world show through. The title, "Poems of the Night 3", suggests part of a sequence, but this poem stands well enough alone. Its claim is modest and strange: the truest view comes at night, when the ordered day has gone and even a shadow can be clear.