Song of Songs...

moon

you’re  not always so formal.

Some man or machine marks

your shade, and sometimes

I take note of it.  But lately

you wane away beneath my skin

and I look you full in the face

while you constantly disappear.

This globe I’m in the middle of blots

you out.  Moon, is this when sorrow

is too much, even for you, acute

observer?  Do you feel it all

rush toward you sometimes, the souls

going out, or coming in?  Is this

departure/arrival in some way

what holds you still in the gravity

of a path so foot-worn even the tormented

find their way to you?

Listen,

I remember a boy, do you? bent

into a gun, the edge of his mother’s

bed beneath his knees.  I imagine

her in a room below, sipping

a cup of tea he’d just poured…

the single effort

he made it to you before she 

made it to him,

didn’t he?  Just days past full—

and his single ripple—a stone

of sound across the surface

of your face—

I want to remember it like this:

I want to know someone outside

of this world received him, this just past

fifteen year old, and maybe it was you—

speechless unprepared, but you,

and he laid down in your gravity

and maybe he rests there still—

because days after he pulled himself

closed you eclipsed—partially—

and days before, while he searched

the house for a key

to the cabinet in the hall

you eclipsed

totally.  And somewhere in between 

and beyond

the almost and the complete

some of you slipped away

with some of him, and settled

in a discrete agreement

in the palm of my hand.  I’ve never put

it down.  Indeed, it calmed inside of me

and it rises once a year—

and he’s still a boy

and he’s got a gun

and the pop through the house

comes to you

and you enfold it

and find me

and I say yes

yes, I’m brave enough

and he was brave enough

and I’ll hold him for you,

what remains…

these past 10, 220 days