#and then spent the next 7 hours driving and beating my head against vba

[mercurymusing]

Moon poem:

Text below cut:

At five A.M. I saw the Moon

    netted in the power lines

        shining full and bright over the fence, under the plum boughs

    just the other side of the car

and yet

        so 

            distantly 

                    serene

    And I wondered

Having known us all since our infancies

        since Our infancy

With all the myriad relationships

    with every creature with eyes to watch the sky

        or blood to feel the tides

Does She have a preference?

    Does She miss the worship?

        The shadowed bacchanalia,

            the myths and legends,

                gods and goddesses,

                    rabbits and romances and

        sacrifice

    Or does She take Her slow pleasure in intimacies?

        The poet's softest sonnets,

            the student's weary toast,

                the night worker's steady company,

                    the refugee's huddled gratitude for Her light

        or for the obscuring grace of Her subtler phase

They say Chicxulub threw ejecta so far

    that there are dinosaurs among the stars

Does She still hold them softly?

    Cradle them to Her face?

        Those long lost souls, that She watched from birth

    from species' birth

            to death

        to extinction

                gleaming in their mortal eyes?

    They, at least, never left-

        never tracked boots and rovers,

            never stabbed slow-bleached wire-waved flags,

                six brief liaisons,

                    and five decades of longing

Was that brief Earthly touch

    a reminder of something older?

They say

    they say many things

        they say once long ago,

    a coconut palm grew from the head of an eel 

            that the Earth was alone,

    a wrathful virgin fed a spy to his own hounds

                    that in its molten youth, 

    a haughty coward jumped second into the fire

                        a wanderer came out of the black,

    and drank her archer's elixir

                            and they met in cataclysmic passion

Does She remember spinning Herself back together

    from a disc of mantle debris?

        How quaint those latter day calamities

At five thirty-two

    at seventy-two miles an hour

        sketching thoughts into a voice note

            I caught Her winking through the pines

                keeping pace beyond the ridge

            watching

                listening

            yet again

                    to some poor lunatic

                        awash in Her light

At six-oh-one

    I passed a man asleep on a bench

        all that he had stacked high in his cart

    and as the corner of a high-rise eclipsed Her face

        I knew that Her warm golden glow guarded him still

At six-oh-seven I left the sky behind

        filled with gulls shrieking their laroid liturgies       

    to worship a triple-screened goddess 

            in a carpet walled shrine

                trading mystery for spreadsheets

        (and my daily bread)

Tonight She rises again

    at eight-oh-six P.M.

I'll be waiting