Tonight the moon was a perfect scimitar
murdering the day
in its own watered-down blood;
tonight the moon was a delicate scythe
harvesting the last fat grains of light
from the over-ripe, ergot-ridden rye.

I looked at the perfect, tortured blade of the moon,
and wondered at its oriental tempering-
how many thousands of foldings
and beatings?
Wondered at the translucent slice of stone:
an impossibly-shaped quartz flake,
knapped and used and left behind by an arctic toolmaker
in the blue-green chalk of the evening sky.

Tonight the moon did not follow me,
as once it did, when I was a child-
when it was made solitary by the window of a night train,
and brushed flat by a row of graveyard pines.
Now, much older, I understand
the moon does not only move for me,
but once!
oh, once,
the moon was mine,
and belonged behind my left shoulder.