Moon: Once More in the Orchard

Moon: Once More in the Orchard

You won’t rise until day's halfway through,

between noon and six

but now, while you scan

the low corners

of the Cortland orchards,

the warmer

autumn fields you'd favored

are lately cooled.  Palm up,

I touch the air

where your face will be

where, when I can,

I'll wait and gaze.

But when the middle of the after-

noon... when someone somewhere

in my life needs a touch

of madness, I'm

soothed smooth for want of you.  I’d ask you

to wait, because seeing

you come

up above the trees,

the way you squeeze through

all those confinements

and labor unscathed,

  is bud’s reiteration still

knocking against the bone
interior

of the apple branch.   But I know

if you so much as lower your eye-

lid I’d be skinned.  I’d be peeled:

shoes, praying knees, silver fillings,

up into the suffocating

fat of the afternoon

heat and scream

or want to, for early morning black.  For

that space, just between you

and me,

where twilight has, for the years

we’ve been trying, broached
the veil, but never, 
not once

  seemed to manage it.
Lifting, light as it is,
light as it is.