Outside Abilene, we said the moon's face
was the color of Orange Crush,
that much too-sweet, that awful bright.

And in a rising dark, East Texas June
cast opal light on our new pair of rings.

Manhattan's moons were lost and lovely,
riffing among skyscrapers, a flute's diaphanous
aside, the dance that made our daughter.
There were the Roman, and the Florentine,
and the wet Dublin moon looking at the Liffey.
We stood in a circle of stones and old time
in a swept cemetery in Shelby County, Texas
where neither blade nor leaf nor flower was, but
sand -
swept bleak moonscape in the middle of the woods.
Under the daymoon at Pete's Canyon, Montana
in bright noon sun, hail inexplicably pocked the
clearing
with its white pebbles, the moon's ghost hovering
Like a thumbprint of smoke.

Remember with me, my long darling, moonlight
as donkey song, a path of stones and midnight
Easter shouts, poppies and a whitewashed wall.
In Greece, that oldest reflection wrought
some change in us we carried home; the moon
thereafter spoke in roses, in sea-silver, thyme
and salt and lemon-scented wind.