It is a fine, beautiful
and lovely time of warm dusk,
having perhaps just a touch
too much
enveloping damp;
but nice, with its idle strollers,
of whom I am one,
and it’s true,
their capacity for good
is limitless, you can tell.
And then—ascending
over the roofs, the budded tips
of trees, in the twilight, very whole
and official,
its black
markings like a face
that has loomed in every city
I have known—it arrives,
the gigantic yellow warrant
for my arrest,
one sixth the size
of the world. I’m speaking
of the moon. I would not give
you a fistful of earth for
the entire moon, I might as well tell you.
For across the futile and empty
street, in the excruciating
are commencing—
degrees are being bestowed
on the deserving,
whereas I’m the incalculable
dullard in the teeshirt here.
Gentlemen of the moon:
I don’t even have
my real shoes on. These are some reformed
hoodlum’s shoes, from the Goodwill. Let
me rest, let me rest in the wake
of others’ steady progress,
closing my eyes,
closing my heart,
shutting the door
in face after face
that has nourished me.