"Man-in-the-Moon" version 3

Moonless


From the end of the cigarette he rolled himself, the man
taps a tiny ash and smoke leaves his mouth.
He doesn’t blow it. Rather, the smoke’s wan
light takes a shade of black from the night.

“My boy, my boy.” His words soft as stones
being turned in the winter creek. He does not
look at the empty cup, looks instead at the bones
that have refleshed with snow muscle,

ice sinew, the seasonal body of the skeletons.
The boy looks up at them, too. And those
beside them in their spiky and permanent green.
When the man blinks, the time it takes

seems a phase his face must go through
night by night. And the boy lifts the pot,
tips the tea out of it, the tea’s earth-dark
dropping into the cup’s lightly shadowed

white. The boy also tips tea into his own
half-full cup and put his chilled hands around it.
The china too hot to touch he lets his hands
wait, and they receive what heat escapes.

The man, his gray cheeks catching the light
cast from the window, his eyes almost lost
in an old distance, lets his lips part, and the cup
touches them, the bottom of the cup rising,

a wide eye, the tattoo-blue emblem of its maker
regarding the table, looking unmoved upon
the boy who blows steam from the surface
of his own tea, who burns his lip and tongue

and puts his cup down. Empty as a shadow,
every earth-dark drop fallen out of it, the man’s cup
cools on its saucer. He pats the blue napkin
between his long hands, lays it softly over the unstirred spoon.

A cloud tears free of the mountain and wipes mist
from the Milky Way. The boy breathes the breath
he can see. There isn’t much in the pot and the cup,
white as dawn, has caught one sharp star on its gold rim.

The boy looks from it to the man’s still face.
Then he pours the tea. “I couldn’t,” the man demurs.
“I couldn’t. All good men must sleep. Even young.”
He laughed. No, he did not laugh. “Even old.
Must walk across the waters that draw their dark

around the stones in the river. Each stone
a dream. And so dream by dream alone he steps the width
of a valley he can’t see the length of, and a wind
blows softly on him or blows sudden and hard.”

The boy tightens the circle of his hands, the heat
of the cup less hard. And when he sees the man’s
hand descending and settling the cup in the saucer’s
center circle he sees the cup is dry. “To keep you

from your bed would be burgling from you, my boy
thieving from you the only way laid out for us who have to go,
who have to go on, from night to day night after night.
How cruel I am to take from you, dear one.” This time

it is the boy who laughs. And he laughs until he hears
the dry crackle of his laughter and he takes refuge
in tea which does not burn him. The ember
of the cigarette lights the whites of the man’s two eyes.