Poem

Lunette 1

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As my mother lay in the deep extremes ……………of sleep that just get deeper as they go, I saw a moon like this. It spoke to me, ……………listened in the ways no full moon can. It hung a lantern in the nothingness ……………where stars wandered farther from each other. Not that it gave me the generous view ……………of gods or astronauts or broken things. Only that it made me feel included ……………in a cold exchange that needed eyes to see inside what was not quite there. ……………Unborn or dead. Difficult to know tomorrow’s news from the dying quarter, ……………the unlit share a dish of ashes now. But if you stare into the severed figure, ……………you can delineate the missing part, its reliquary-shade of bone and candle. ……………You see, in a work in progress, a mirror of your passage, a revenant, a rumor, ……………a bruise, or barring that, a mother deep asleep beneath the wreckage of the leaves.