Remembering him for a while today,
remembering just how much of me he had loved
when I didn't. The things he had seen
when I didn't see the distances he went.
To the moon and back,
it could have been.

To the moon and back.
Just how much of an effort
he'd gone to just to meet my hand
across the expanse is hard to believe.
Imagine the distance between
the moon and my side of his bed.
How difficult it must have been to breathe
how arid and how vacant
it must have felt. He never said.

I'd like to ask him what it was like,
trying to get to me-
ask about the journey
but we don't speak anymore, and anyway
I know how tiring it was, loving me.

Last year, Neil Armstrong died.
They scattered his ashes over the sea.
Somewhere between the moon and tide
there is something legendary

It was 1972, the last time a man on the moon
set his human footprint in.
Since then, no one has dared go back,
and instead send lunar rovers
to explore its cratered skin
and send in the satellites that send us answers
to the questions that we have about space
and do the learning for us.
Do the loving in our place.

I suppose it is safer that way.
To stay on earth and look at the moon
and admire it, from far away.
In the arms of whoever you can love,
with the expense of something like intimacy
surely it's better to be able to love
right up close, across smaller gaps
than the span of a galaxy.