Restless Moon

It all fell suddenly…
The mountains on the moon.
Standing in frigid
Stark winter fields
I felt caught in the debris
Of distant tremors.

This is impossibility.
Shaking myself
I tried to disengage
To repossess my rationality.
Nevertheless
I wait in the empty land
Beneath
The dirty coin moon.
She stares at me
Through elongated eyes
Like a gilded Greek icon.

The moon probes
My wayward heart.
She knows
There are places
I’d rather be.
She knows
There are places
I must never go.

Perhaps the moon
Yearns to change her orbit.
Maybe she
Would rather strike across the cosmos
Eager to, once again, be
Thought a goddess
Rather than an arid
Lifeless disk.

We went to the moon
Plundering her secrets
Robbing her of romance
Leaving her naked
Before our critical gaze
Having mapped her mountains
And wandered her valleys.
We are travelers
Of her terrain
And she offers no further allure.

A virgin no longer
She is nothing more
Than afterthought
And nothing less than
A dry, dusty vacuum
About whom nobody write poems.

I understand her
And she sees me.

Maybe the moon is restless, too.