I once knew a boy who built a ladder to the moon
-- drafted rays,
atmosphere,
stars,
into the rungs he climbed;
he fell in love with her beauty:
the way she lit the night,
the way she orbited him,
and became everything he ever cared about.
So he made it his mission
to capture the moon
for the girl that became it for him.

She sent a package
tied in this biege tweed cord.

It turned out to
be a picture of you two
at the lake,
that day it was cold
and she wore that beanie with the flames,
her hair all curly and escaping,
your lips all red and chapped.

A folded note tucked on the inside
of the frame reads:

"I have Connie,
*******

Love always,
smiley-face,
smiley-face
smiley-face,
smiley-face,
me."

­Connie: your/her rat terrier.

You put the picture
in its black frame
on the tv table.

The tweed
you nail
to two spaced planks
on the wall above the tv.

It's like abstract
modernist-expressionist-
constructionist-art.

It's just one string.

A taut cord
of brown tweed.

The black night comes,
over and over,
over and over,
she doesn't return,
but the tweed remains
as taut as a fingernail
or an exposed artery.

Somehow
it's so human and obstinate
that the woven vertebrae
seems to curve minutely
and femininely.

As time passes,
the tweed moves
from beige
to golden
and gravitational.

A call to a friend goes something like this:
"Come over here, I've got this amazing thing on my wall."

The friend, Eric,
calls more friends.

The friends come over,
all piling around this golden tweed
after they've taken stock of the kitchen
and Wild Turkey.


They take turns
plucking it,
thumbing it,
putting their ears to it,
and studying it,
all
at your insistence.

Somebody,
******* Eric,
coughs in the room.
More people begin to cough.

Eric walks up
to the the string,
that is nailed at top
and bottom
on two spaced planks.



Eric gives it a final hard tug,
snapping it like a belt.

the tweed hums and shivers off a few flakes
of dust and amber material.

"I've just wasted five minutes
with this thing,"
Eric says

to the string,
and you.

Eric speaks for the group.

He turns and leaves,
taking the whole group of
twenty
with him.

They trail behind Eric
like a great, long tail
flicking
and knocking things over
in your apartment
out of sheer agitation
on the way out.

The golden gravity subsumes you.

You do not close the door behind them,
you can't even hear their tiny, black voices
as they all clamor into the elevator
and ding.

The ten commandments say nothing,
in the translations I’ve read,
against coveting my neighbor’s good
fortune,
timing,
intentions,
sense of style,
or the countless other intangibles
gifted by Nature
and our DNA's mischievous inventions.

I’m a strict constructionist,
when it suits me, and especially so
with documents carved in stone
by invisible hands
having no recorded fondness for the market.

I’d trade places with any nameless witch
caught cavorting in her coven’s canopied oases,
their cauldron-ringing capers
and care-free cackles cheered
by owl hoots and cricket song;

Or the smallish, self-sacrificing spider
who rather than a cigarette gets a close-up
view of his mate’s spinnerets dispensing
the silk sheets to wrap him
as a happy meal deferred.

I also envy their creepy hatchlings
who weeks later will climb to the tip-tops
of firry fingers, cast a single wistful thread
and wait for the wish-fulfilling wind
to carry them lifetimes away.

That’s how I could stiff this chill
that taps me on the shoulder, and chase
after a far-off warmth I’ve weened
since my weaning was done.

I count these covets no sins.