ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 132
Moonrise Against Daylight Savings
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How many errors the old masters dreamed
they had in dreams they never wrote,
deciding the moon has cotton eyes,
but one’s put out and cut apart to make
a thousand light-choked stars we’ll never see again,
when, if the moon’s a cotton eye itself,
it’s got no eyes but that shown to itself
in some, dishonest, lazy Winter dreamed
by some old trickster bent to make the moon a moon again
in some ink mirror that of ocean’s wrote
that each can make
a two of every story that your eyes
decide to tell you with an eye
to hide what the new moon looks like, in itself,
if any eye could condescend to make
some unmediated Summer dream
as if some god were in it and once wrote
“The moon you think you see is that same moon again.”
But it still seems to be itself again,
the same old flirting, winking eye
that sings me month-long songs I know by rote,
and is so much itself, that in itself,
it is the same bland errors that I’d dreamed
about, when the new moon, in the Spring, makes
a Winter when the city’s lights will make
the stars that were the other eye again,
the way I always dream
that what the poets said about my
sense that every thing seems like itself
in Falls that seem to grab me by the throat.
But these, I found, are things my elders wrote,
when I went back to see the seasons make
them hang their Autumns’ moons, their time itself,
their sense that this is this again again,
as if they didn’t care that I
might want to see and think that I don’t see a dream.
But even that’s a dream they wrote
to catch what wandering eyes would make,
thinking, looking at a sky and sea, that they see themselves again.
