Full Moon: The Gorge

BEN BELITT

FULL MOON: THE GORGE

(Cuernavaca)

for Sibyl Myron

With the moon at full, its blind side

falls toward the Gorge, two flint-stones kindling

a glare in sidereal trash: tin-tops, bottles and glasses

starring the foliage with the constellation of The Pair-

a pubis of blackening mangrove on a pubis of ash,

a mating of firmaments, fatal and beautiful there.

All absent things move toward their fullness now:

all shaping artifacts, essences, human similitudes,

briny or bloody deluges, sweat-drops, semen and air,

all troubled tossings of parturitive foam

or fiery paradigms that work in the perishing

flesh to dazzle the pulses and sparkle like mustard seeds

for the bird in the animal excrement, the ammoniac

singer-

toward that zenith warmed by the sunlight, the egg in the

down

of exorbitant dark: light's underside

where the cry of the pottering flyer fails on Canaveral

and, one after one, the universes disclose themselves

in the gravitational swamps, as noonday burns to its socket

and is night. Night. Night as I would have it,

night that I sought in its festival guises as sun-stone,

planetary rose, salt with its faceted enigmas, fern,

fires of the sexual whale saying: I am. I made it. in

catastrophic sperm, love's underside, love's failings, tears-

yes, love's ignominious reversals that my heart's starvation

would have reversed if it could: night with its names for

powers,

dominations, fears: houses, Homeric fictions: Dante astray

in the tiger-taken wood: Hell with its vortical vengeances:

and night, night without respite or guile, the light of

common day.