Moon

I've been neglecting to write to you.

I've been so distracted and upset, so busy looking for work.  Writing anything has become a chore and so I've put it all off, but I should never put this off, telling you these things.  I can't tell you any other way.  I'm bad at talk and you're awkward and embarrassed when I try.  No matter how much it pains me to write I can't put this off.

The moon is immense tonight, forcefully present, as colored as a street light.  I left the party and sang to the moon as I drove.  I remembered the night we lay in the field.  I hoped you would kiss me.  You talked about the stars, nervous, about navigation by starlight, about the constellations in Cuba.  I let my hand fall into the coolness of the field and plucked the first stem my fingers touched.  I twirled it between my fingers as you talked, felt its ridged frail form, the way it bumped unevenly as it spun.  I repeated in my head, "Sedges have edges.  Sedges have edges."  Just to keep myself quiet.  I liked the sound of your stories.  The moon rose over the pines on the ridge.  It was as large as this moon, but white, not golden.  When it came up I interrupted you.  "The moon," I said, as if you couldn't see it too.  But that's how bad I am at talk.  I meant to say, This is a singular moment.  We will never see this moon rise again.  You smiled and held your breath and it pulled itself up, away from the tips of the trees as we tilted toward it slowly on an Earth that would never be the same again as it was that night.

Tonight the moon lights the sky with a green light, eerie and lovely, crisp.  I am watching it move like a moored boat across the highway, slow and resigned, confined to its orbit.  Hit the line at the end of its orbit and rock back across the earth again, slow, in another month, when everything will be different and everything will be the same.  That green light.  There was a green curtain hung across the hatch on your boat, lit from behind by the backcast glow of the Locks.  In that pale light your skin was as golden as the moon.  I kissed you.  The bell at the Locks rang like neon in the rain.

Come home soon.  I want to stand on the deck with you and watch the moon, before it falls behind the trees, cushes into its fenders, creaks against its lines.