Monday Poem

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Hazy Moon
Jim Culleny


Last night I almost hugged the hazy moon,
that crazy bubble in the sky
who is ever entering new phases.

She rose red, round, and huge
as a melon of imagination.

She loomed listening to the pine pitch
and birch bark, an ear for the night choir.
She tugged,
I leaned as she rolled higher.

Two hands from the horizon
she pulled in humble as a quarter,
levitated, and kissed
the high limb tips of a twisted
locust tree.

For a moment, free
in the circle of her gravity,
I understood what that chalkball moon
held over me.

She hovered like a lover on a balcony
waiting for a star to shoot.
She disappeared once each month
leaving the shadow undilute,
but she was never faithless.

Always she returned
sweet as an arc of canteloupe,
billowing like a parachute,
calling to the oceans in their cells,
reaching down to the tips
of the deepest roots,
coaxing up through the tender stems
of slender shoots,
dragging, even through the leather hearts
of old galoots
the purest waters of the poorest wells.
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