There is no water on the moon.
No one can make love up there.
If you tried to pray you’d float away or die.
There is no spinning wheel
on the moon, no tender yarn
of skinstraw-gold
that winds into a dream of being warmed by wool,
no spinning there at all—
just the bony ground
that won’t dance for us, but turns
slowly as a sad child
grows. The stars around it sing
sharp as spindles.
Our flesh
is blunt ash and far.
No one goes there anymore.
We stay on earth, tell old tales—Briar Rose,
Rumplestiltskin. We watch
our children try to guess his name—
Sheepshanks, Spindleshanks—
their failures can’t fill
the dense mare frigoris, the seas
of flaked basalt
that scrape the throat. The child’s cry won’t seal
heaven’s stone hole. The sky demands
confession: I miss
the way my mother
would say moon,
I miss my brother’s corduroy arms
in the dark, his red
telescope. I miss feeling sure
of our hair, the yard’s night-lit moss, how
I knew the wings of the divine
were pale, dry, rounded,
a mother’s shoulders, white and lunar
on a cold night that needs contrails,
silver threads, to tell a story
of flight machines, explain a small body’s flight
in prayer. Praise the spindle. Praise
the drive wheel, praise
the peg, the mother-of-all—
O maria: praise
the cold, dry rivers of the moon.
They cannot know the rain
and they will not rise again.
