The moon coming back,
your breath returning,
love replenishing itself.
        Allison Funk

I Datura

It’s warm enough
to sit out on the porch

till late:
             the windows
all along this street

burning out
                   one by one
till only the moon

and the saw-toothed pumpkins
set out in the yards

are visible
                 as if the town
had finally succumbed

to magic
               — and what if the moon
and the ocean

are one long
conversation?

surely the same applies
to prairie
               something tidal in the grass

coming to light
                         first here
then out amongst

the angel’s trumpets,
ice-white in the dark,

a wavelength
given form along a fence

and asked to stand
for spirits not yet known

but sensed
                  the way the wind
belongs to us

if only for a moment
                                  as it fills
a sleepless head with music
                                             or a taste

for distance
when we rise to go inside

and something else arrives
to claim the dark.

II Moon

These are the autumn nights
we learn from books

a Chinese moon
suspended in the sky

our bodies warm
and graceful in the dark

as if we had stepped sideways
into something

animal: the new scent on our hands
conjured from grass and water

and flecked with blood;
the gradual shift

from one form to the next
so visible in every glint and slide

it makes me wonder
why a soul would want

the same again,
why anyone would go

to life eternal
given all this sweet

proliferation:
salt to dreaming salt,

the long exchange
of memory and warmth

that guides the Arctic tern
from pole to pole

as surely as it guides us
to the bank.

There is nothing we know
for sure
              and nothing much

we care to know
beyond this moment’s span,

the one thing we might have said
if we had to speak

is how the body
leaves itself behind

in rivers and storms,
caresses and empty rooms,

and each of us knows the other
as water knows

the bodies it transforms
and then surrenders:

fingers, the curve of the throat,
the windless

undertow of watergreen
and void

that waits to be re-entered
like a vow.

It makes me wonder
why we ever think

of anything
beyond this ebb and flow

III Salt

or why Xenocrates,
that sullen Greek,

would picture us
as shadows on the moon

between the life we have
and that to come.

I wonder if he thought
our other souls

were real, half-human,
standing in the light,

dusted
with silver

and barely a flicker of wings
at their crippled shoulders,

I wonder
if they seemed to him

benevolent, or ghostly,
true, or false,

gathered together
for warmth and conversation,

twins to the living souls
they would replace,

remembering
the fragrance of a rose,

the weight of snow,
or how an apple falls

forever
on the cusp of afternoon.

Surely he would have
known enough to guess

that souls live in the dark,
like fleas, or mice,

and these, our other selves,
are neither vague nor pale,

but utterly substantial
when they swarm

in hundreds,
on the far side of the moon,

cunning, feral,
waiting to be born,

no more or less like us
than rocks, or sand,

but marked with a slipknot of blood
for the world to come:

its salt and rain, its feasts,
its widowhood.