Under DarknessAuthor(s): Daniel HalpernSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Fall, 1979), p. 29Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20140278 .

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Under Darkness Daniel Halpern

Nothing changes, darkness over the body holds steady and complete, consumes light as it lifts over the ledge of sea and falls onto the body asleep.

In darkness the black pennies of death over the lids hold eyes in darkness. The body falls back and back,

pressed into the recessive landscapes

of sleep. No one walks here, or here, or here.

There are those spinning on spokes of light who remain unseen. This is the literature

and history of light, light that is in air

but no longer alive at its source:

it arrives homeless and dying. Again and again

no change, setting

out alive

and bright, moving forward with the dark

already eating at the base and the home wood. The body and the body's beauty are lights that belong nowhere but in air,

leaving nowhere, going nowhere, suspended

in the dark, tunneling with what life is left

through their own dark root systems. Pennies rattle on the fluttering eyes of those still

alive, those feeding off the flesh of darkness.

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