The Arching Sky Is Calling

Lunar Tune:

The moon is mottled : dark shadows eat
Into the sockets of the skull of a world
Laid away in the blue winding-sheet. 

It dwindles and sharpens to the curled
And Cheshire grin of heaven vanishing.
But the twenty-eighth day returns it, pearled 

And possible as ever. Now a low-flying wing
Of silver, now rolling a leprous wheel,
It turns in the jewelled machine like a bearing. 

All lovers can distill this reel
Into their absolute and make it yield
A white wine only they can feel. 

To press this greatest grape from heaven's field
Lovers will toe the mark of their esteem.
For them it warms and covers like a shield 

But shakes the mad who rot along the seam
That binds them to their kind till on their bed
The darkside moonshine falls and kills the dream 

They once had had of being more than dead.

Gray Burr.