Lunar Spring Thaw
Across the street a little girl screams
the way only children can: a scream
of delight, but still, every grown-up
in every yard turns their head to check.
She is taunting gravity with a puddle,
splashing banana-yellow boots down
into the muddy meltwater, drops
arcing out into space or bending back
to speckle the hem of her pink coat
and her improbably white leggings,
even up to the gleaming red coil
of her face.
She screams again when her mother
backhands her cheek, doubles its color,
and then once more as she is yanked
by the arm up to the house. More heads turn,
tsk, tsk, turn away. Above them, the moon
just now clearing the roofline is pocked
and scarred wherever bits of dust and rock
and ice have struck her, because the moon
has no atmosphere, all her scars come
in silence. Here on earth, scars
come silent and deafening and all
frequencies between, and so
we who are mostly water
must learn to build, layer by layer,
our own atmospheres, stripes of
troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere,
sheathing to deflect
the smallest bolides and break
larger ones into fragments that flame
the night sky, so we might
make wishes at them.
But some among us never learn the trick
and instead remain as moons, noiseless
and present, craters and pocks aglow
for all to see, waxing and waning,
tugging the oceans of human love
to and fro. This night, the moon seems
to take up the whole of the sky, lighting
the street bone-blue; in such light
the girl's mother comes out to the street
again, screaming herself now, into a cell phone.
In the upstairs window a small face, freshly
scrubbed, ashen, watching her mother's body
bend and twitch and dream of velocity.