Chasing "The Cat"

"Outside it was night
like a book without letters.
And the eternal dark
dripped to the stars through the sieve of the
city."

In this wonderfully deep poem, Miroslav Holub addresses countless meaning through deliberate word-choice. A book without letters could be a picture book, a book of runes, or (what I believe to be most likely) an empty stack of pages. The implications of an empty page are truly astronomical: the night is entirely what we make of it. Our imaginations run most rampant in the darkness.  Then saying that the "dark dripped to the stars," Holub has both impressed me with his alliteration and confused me with the use of "to." In the analogy, it seems as though the stars would be the holes in the sieve that allow the draining to occur. However, looking to the sky, the stars are surrounded by darkness: the sieve seems to be composed of the darkness. This seems to suggest that darkness is indeed the light that shines through the sieve. Blank pages are white; stars shine white. Maybe Holub is saying that darkness, in the literal sense, is true light, in the figurative sense. That is to say, the embrace of darkness is a virtue of those seeking the light. After all this, I am made to ask: Did Holub consider this in the such detail?