Photo Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Renaissance Tapestries

The Tectonics of Moonlight

Striking the leaves of the trees
A sound like raindrops
The blotting-paper wings of individuals
Upward seeking, moths
Swarming in the harvest moon.

Looking for a place to pound your ear?
Don't you know you're somebody's sunshine?
The clouds' unself-conscious shape-up
Said the selfness in loving-kindness
Is singlemindedness of purpose.

Getting a child with child
Is something like make-believe.
Didn't I get under that skin of yours,
Guileless as the rain,
Knocked up with a boarding-house reach?

A handful of milkweed crushed my heap of bricks,
The flaked paint on the molding and the odor
From the dumbwaiter,
When you came to my sweltering berth
With your cool arms
And what I have known of roads
In a confluence of soft lips.

The field of six bullocks
The meadow of the heifer with a star between her horns
The striped badger shifting for himself,
The nightingale thrilled in yon rose thicket
The turn-turtle turbot we ate ourselves sick on
And the squid-scarred moon.

Kenneth Tindall

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