O moon, I will save you.
I watch you rise in the daytime,
stunned by the squat cancer blue,
overcome by snappings of cloud,
letting go the night-anchors,
looking lost up there.
I passed out, drunk
for the second time today
& when I woke up,
you were broadcasting
several degrees deeper
into a fool's gold evening,
a sickly sweet beacon, luminous
almost to the point of absurdity,
I saw all your seas and mounds
unskirted. You seem alarmed,
watching my wounds so closely,
yet absent of gesture,
an affixed milk-marrow.
I will save you, moon;
after all, I am your Sisyphus:
I push and push at you
with these soaking stanzas
& each night you tumble back.
Do you remember rising over
the Hotel Tiquetonne in Paris,
when I tried to prize you
from your socket
above the church in Les Halles,
& give you to her?
But you resisted, so I exchanged you
like currency; the stars so fluent,
bands of bleach in your halo,
you grew hair that fell out
in screaming stripes,
& I ate tartare at midnight.
O moon, I know now
that I cannot save you -
if anything, you must come
& claim me away.
You seem happy in your tides,
so certain in your arc and arch,
the delight of little elevations
in the black valleys.
You are the knot in the bark,
celestial gland, eternal bone
that rules over all bones -
so come and get me.
O steady eye-knuckle,
someday you will rise
over a world that is unencumbered
by my step; by any step.
In its last days, the earth
will call you home,
long after my memories
of Tiquetonne seep into loam.
Cyclical cinder, little ash,
you will not weep -
you will not weep,
O salvage moon,
but will transmit the final stanzas
of a requiem to a world
that cannot speak your tongue,
but will understand the paleness
of a poem that is dying.