The Moon Swiveled Around

by Yaacov Dovid Shulman

The moon swiveled around
So that I could only see the back of her head.
How silent were the stars.
But we, we were chattering in the back seat,
In the front seat,
We flipped through the puddles,
We raced through the snowfields,
We rushed up the mountains to fields of caravans,
We hunched over and dug for radishes,
We were pursued by a beating heart through the windy downtown tenements in our dreams,
We curled in sleep in the branches of the universal tree
And slept, beloved.

The mystic moon was as clear as steel,
As tearless as glass,
As bright as a scintillating day
That waited patient and expectant,
That was the absence of all self
Except for the lumbering Jackson Pollack souls,
All of us, spattered exclamations of black, red, yellow ferment
Seeping into the sere dawn,
Our scattered colors catching on the colors of others,
The moon turned her head and the heavens were still,
And in that stillness
Our hearts were seized with stillness
And then spoke, of their own accord.