Moonglint
To find myself standing on the moon,
its tinny glister glowing my nude skin
grayish white like a snail’s sticky belly
was no surprise, for less than an instant
before I’d been racing slowly across
a campus in just my underpants, late
to take a final exam in a class
I’d forgotten to attend. Leaden dread
was my very being, the core despair
I’d be in the bodiless underworld.
Yes, of course I’m ashamed of my penis,
nor would I deny what a sneaky fraud
and lying weasel I’ve been. Your analysis
is too book perfect; I’ve no need to sleep
to confess. The moon’s colorless limn
is the same light that winks where the dead
float urgently purposeless from any place
to another as time stays always one time
and therefore isn’t. Of course, astronauts
were hopping around me like kangaroos,
giddy in the novelty of gliding
in airless air. It was, after all, the moon.
How could they, encased in larval space suits,
see or hear an old pale wraith of a man
wearing just underwear, whose leaden arms
could not rise to wave, whose strident cries
stayed frozen soundless in steely glare?
Dozing reverie half-here, then all there
and not here at all, but where is there?
Achilles strides off in exultant gloat,
in gray black-and-white, or colorized?
Does the crocodile, logging the pond
with only green-yellow devil-slashed eyes
periscoped on heedless boys diving for golf balls
underneath him in their underpants,
actually speak French or just understand
my fluent French? There, I try in vain
to get from some here to some there,
though there and here are the same there
unlike here where hope makes desire.
And there shone the glimmering moon
grown full again when I stopped at my walk’s
turnabout at the brow of the high hill
where I mop my brow, take a pull of coffee,
and look up for a brief prayer. Thus, I make
every morning, moon or no moon, the same.
And this morning across the fat moon’s
pearly glister was the exact same stain
that the Adam and Eve hominids gazed
in grief upon when they slunk from their forest
onto horizonless savannah. All changes
though nothing changes. But as I shivered
in the corpse pale light of the dreamy moon
no one came to ask me, “Where are you?”
or “Who told thee that thou wast naked?”
so I retied my earflaps, tested my flashlight,
and threw questions back to the moon,
following its silver smear back down the hill
never expecting an answer.
its tinny glister glowing my nude skin
grayish white like a snail’s sticky belly
was no surprise, for less than an instant
before I’d been racing slowly across
a campus in just my underpants, late
to take a final exam in a class
I’d forgotten to attend. Leaden dread
was my very being, the core despair
I’d be in the bodiless underworld.
Yes, of course I’m ashamed of my penis,
nor would I deny what a sneaky fraud
and lying weasel I’ve been. Your analysis
is too book perfect; I’ve no need to sleep
to confess. The moon’s colorless limn
is the same light that winks where the dead
float urgently purposeless from any place
to another as time stays always one time
and therefore isn’t. Of course, astronauts
were hopping around me like kangaroos,
giddy in the novelty of gliding
in airless air. It was, after all, the moon.
How could they, encased in larval space suits,
see or hear an old pale wraith of a man
wearing just underwear, whose leaden arms
could not rise to wave, whose strident cries
stayed frozen soundless in steely glare?
Dozing reverie half-here, then all there
and not here at all, but where is there?
Achilles strides off in exultant gloat,
in gray black-and-white, or colorized?
Does the crocodile, logging the pond
with only green-yellow devil-slashed eyes
periscoped on heedless boys diving for golf balls
underneath him in their underpants,
actually speak French or just understand
my fluent French? There, I try in vain
to get from some here to some there,
though there and here are the same there
unlike here where hope makes desire.
And there shone the glimmering moon
grown full again when I stopped at my walk’s
turnabout at the brow of the high hill
where I mop my brow, take a pull of coffee,
and look up for a brief prayer. Thus, I make
every morning, moon or no moon, the same.
And this morning across the fat moon’s
pearly glister was the exact same stain
that the Adam and Eve hominids gazed
in grief upon when they slunk from their forest
onto horizonless savannah. All changes
though nothing changes. But as I shivered
in the corpse pale light of the dreamy moon
no one came to ask me, “Where are you?”
or “Who told thee that thou wast naked?”
so I retied my earflaps, tested my flashlight,
and threw questions back to the moon,
following its silver smear back down the hill
never expecting an answer.
