Sometimes, Moon
I
I look you in the eyes
and see my hollows.
Sometimes, you go dark.
And I vanish with you.
Other times,
you shine in the place
where something once lacked in me.
II
Sometimes, Moon lies down on rooftops,
and in her craters echo the sounds
of my childhood.
Sometimes, Moon sharpens her nails on the sky,
and scratches me
with forgotten memories.
Sometimes, Moon drinks me slowly,
like venom spilled through time.
And sometimes, only sometimes,
the hole in my chest pulses up there
suspended, round,
like the eye of the world
refusing to shut.
III
I do not see you, Moon.
But I know you’re there.
You reside in the dark sky,
a vault-home of sages,
of geniuses and murderers,
of fathers and mothers, nephews,
cousins, friends and enemies
of everyone and no one, all at once.
Your absence weighs
more than your light.
Yet you are power, etched in the laws of physics,
a signal for flowers to begin
their brief flight toward existence,
an antithesis of what we mistake for an end.
In the dark,
I am all ears
for what you do not say.
In you,
I rest what I don’t know how to feel,
just as you must rest
your reflective blades
from the labor of illuminating
things and people.
New Moon, must you work
again? For what?
And why do you dance your place in the sky?
Not for unpredictability.
You are product
of past astronomers’ equations.
Not for will. None of us acts from will.
Some of us, like you,
withdraw from life.
Let the questions be asked
by drunkards and philosophers.
Go on and rest, New Moon,
for you are a laborer like us
and if you don’t work,
you starve.