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Why does the moon at night
look closer than it actually is?
So close you can read the terrain.
So close you can imagine going there,
touching it. Is it an illusion
created by the circle of reflected light
floating in the ocean of darkness?
Or is it our yearning?
I think about it
when I look across the room
and there you are, as usual,
going about your regular business,
immersed in thought and worry.
When you're dressed
I imagine you naked,
and when you're naked
I imagine you in clothes, it's like
I always want something else.
And I think I could reach out
and touch you,
but then something inside me
says no, it's not true, nothing
is as close as it seems,
and if you try to go there
you will become untethered,
suffocate,
float away forever,
a fading pinprick
in the vast blackness of space.
So I wait anxiously to see
what you will do next:
You continue along your fixed path
as if it were calculated precisely
to keep me
at a distance.
Wow, this starts off as one thing, and becomes something else! From a poem about the moon ("at night," which I thought redundant at first, but then understood that the moon at night is precisely what the poem is asking us to consider) ... it morphs into a poem about your relationship with your beloved. Changing ... like the moon! Ultimately the poem is about how close we think are versus how close we really are. About the laws of physics and attraction that create the illusion of closeness while simultaneously keeping the distance that is required to maintain the proper orbit.
ReplyDeleteExactemundo! Somehow we are celestial bodies attracting and repelling to maintain a certain tension, balance and motion, that we call relationships.
ReplyDeleteCross-reference my poem on thelionofpoetry.squarespace.com called "We Collide in Space".
ReplyDeleteRead it again. Yes. Well done. Maybe it was somewhere in the back of my mind.
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