The black and gold stitch
from the upper gill of a brook trout
to the middle ray of the tail fin,
you once told me, houses hair cells
sensitive to the flow of the stream.
And the rest…that dark green
swath on the flank,
the spots of ocher, stipples
blood red ringed with cornflower blue…
the whole thing shimmering
with the most delicate scales,
to the fisherman’s eye
is a revelation. You too,
after you led me down at dusk
into a stream so cold
it made my ankles hurt,
and after we caught one each,
just big enough to keep
and cook on a little fire we made
at the foot of the mountain
under the Dog Day stars, you too,
when you smiled, freckles by firelight
trembling on the back of your hand.
Brooks Haxton
To the Moon
After I thumbed a ride I saw you
in the passenger window, more
than a crescent, almost half.
It was getting dark, and a voice
on the car radio was reporting
that Neil Armstrong had stepped
onto the Sea of Tranquility.
He was walking there in the dust.
Five times more, men visited,
two at a time. Some of them
lowered moon buggies out of a bay
in the side of the lander. These
they unfolded and took for a spin.
Flower children of my generation
thought that the men were middle-aged,
and they were, but they were children too.
They left moon buggies in your lap.
I wanted to tell you last year,
when I saw you in the bare limbs
at your narrowest crescent
next to the morning star,
and just this fall when you were large
and bright as I had ever seen:
to consider you in the night sky is
to release the mind more deeply into itself.
If Earth is alive, you were alive
when these men lived on you.
When they left you died,
and they plunged living into the sea.
- Brooks Haxton