A Man Against the Moon
Is it Luna makes me looney? O moon,
so fulsome with sticky glitters,
is it you making me cry in this bitter wind,
aching hollows up the nose, behind
my eyes? Old as I am, I recollect
asking in priapic years your minion stars,
that you in your same-old smug silence
out-shone to nothing, why my lot
was to be pimply-sad in love. Is vortex
prattle come back again, but polar
and double now, just wild west wind
redux old poets O-ed about in odes?
Surely not the vortex of the vorticist poet
at whose feet we squatted like kids
on kindergarten rugs, nodding
in solemn pretense of deep sagacity
as if each muttered fragment
made a perfect engine concentrating energy
at the still center of a raging funnel,
etcetera. Oh, it’s always been you, moon--
you still mover of oceans that do blow
the winds, tugger of hot young hearts
and chiller of hoary white heads.
I’m sure it’s you, hiding in a white blaze
at the dead center of the black sky,
who makes me weep all the way home
against a wind so frozen fierce
it rebukes my brain like regrets swollen
to the fore and hardened to cement.
so fulsome with sticky glitters,
is it you making me cry in this bitter wind,
aching hollows up the nose, behind
my eyes? Old as I am, I recollect
asking in priapic years your minion stars,
that you in your same-old smug silence
out-shone to nothing, why my lot
was to be pimply-sad in love. Is vortex
prattle come back again, but polar
and double now, just wild west wind
redux old poets O-ed about in odes?
Surely not the vortex of the vorticist poet
at whose feet we squatted like kids
on kindergarten rugs, nodding
in solemn pretense of deep sagacity
as if each muttered fragment
made a perfect engine concentrating energy
at the still center of a raging funnel,
etcetera. Oh, it’s always been you, moon--
you still mover of oceans that do blow
the winds, tugger of hot young hearts
and chiller of hoary white heads.
I’m sure it’s you, hiding in a white blaze
at the dead center of the black sky,
who makes me weep all the way home
against a wind so frozen fierce
it rebukes my brain like regrets swollen
to the fore and hardened to cement.
