XIV

Tonight I had wanted the moon to be milky
But she came to me with teeth instead
Small and serrated
In a porcelain dish.
That girl: she took the sharp young things in her silver hands and left them right on my doorstep, laughing,
So I had to sigh and swallow them down into the dampness of my home with gratitude
(One does not deny the moon her gifts, even when they come with teeth.)
It is the first hot moon of summer and the grass is only beginning to know itself after all the pillage of winter.
It is only timidly blue, in the way that birds sometimes hide a color beneath a brown fold of feather, flirting with themselves, I suppose,
And only small packs of crickets minstrel about, in the moon-baked city of blue blades.
They uncross their long and creaking legs, always in a dance with death, and gasp forward into scattered filaments of song.
There is no time for silence under the first hot summer moon,
And the rain strokes down across the old sleeping mountains in harps and in waves.
Some of the drops get snagged on the thick lights of old stars as they fall, and are fated to spend eternity in their ancient arms, listening as their creased silver mouths give the history of everything, in the Stoney old language shared only between very old stars and their cousins, the whales.
The moon is dancing high around the world, all thighs and spirit.
She always laughs when I ask her for a song, and she fills my bones with gifts that don’t know that they’re gifts til much later.
I think, next moon, I will leave out a tea candle and some wine for her. A string of white bells.
I will barter her gladly for stories, for dance, for the soft words of old stars.
I will ask her for a love who speaks my language. For a thimble, and a soap dish of light.
For now I drink the sharp rays in, catching snippets of down-drifting whale song, and their hostage drops of rain, strung like cats-cradle throughout the sky.

I think maybe that’s what makes the net, holding up all the stars.

 
✨🌘🌑🌒✨