Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The Commute
- Warming
- Walking Home
- Cycling the Island
- The Garden
- Swallow Hole
- Sylvia Plath's House
- Sixteen Acres
- The Trap
- Praise Song
- View of a Badger on the Heights Road
- The Meaning of Birds
- The Ghost of a Flea
- Nest
- Twinned Sonnets
- Counting the Pennies
- Swan Upping
- The Frozen River
- Marsh Lily
- Praise Song
- To a Dandelion
- Moths
- Sestina for Rain
- A Perfect Mirror
- The Unicorn
- Praise Song
- Relics
- Getting Lost
- Woods in Snow
- Moon Walk
- Halfway Back
- New Moon
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Moon Walk
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The Commute
- Warming
- Walking Home
- Cycling the Island
- The Garden
- Swallow Hole
- Sylvia Plath's House
- Sixteen Acres
- The Trap
- Praise Song
- View of a Badger on the Heights Road
- The Meaning of Birds
- The Ghost of a Flea
- Nest
- Twinned Sonnets
- Counting the Pennies
- Swan Upping
- The Frozen River
- Marsh Lily
- Praise Song
- To a Dandelion
- Moths
- Sestina for Rain
- A Perfect Mirror
- The Unicorn
- Praise Song
- Relics
- Getting Lost
- Woods in Snow
- Moon Walk
- Halfway Back
- New Moon
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Summary
What are the Lunarians up to tonight?
You ask. There's the moon hanging mute
off the back of the hill. What sad mouths
it has, what limping eye, it keeps us awake
with its mooning. You know it is rock, gravity
holding it and us together and apart; a Soviet
poster shows a cosmonaut caught by a thumb
on the moon's hook. There's no God up there
it says, confirming what no one can confirm.
Before either of us was made, (your egg inside
my egg inside my mother) they sent Laika
for whom there was no return, only the marvel
of earth and the moon rising brighter, brighter
in the window of her craft. Whatever
they want us to believe, let's leave her there,
a moon goddess for the moon people
on their moonwalk, just like us out after hours,
we who know the Lunarian flag has stars.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Perfect Mirror , pp. 49Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018