Mike Dockins
The Girl In The Moon
She crouches in an astronaut's footprint,
her shovel scuffed by decades of digging.
Though she does not grow old, she is gray
with Moon dust, & as she digs she peers
at the Earth: a slash of blue against the darkness.
She watches the planet shiver & swirl.
When astronomers think they see something
moving on the Moon, they blink, crawl
from their telescope wombs, return
to epicycles & parallaxes, their infinite litter
of pencil shavings, uncertain what she is
unearthing: what blank eyes, what busted wing….
The Moon unspools from the Earth, layers
of dust & rock unraveling like an orange peel,
all piloted by the girl, erasing the footprint.
Perihelion
The world is full of lovely barmaids. When the Earth slingshots around the sun, they spill off into space - pulled by the inertia - & are saved only by my lust, which could crack an atom, and does - severed protons riffle my toes like sand. Lovely barmaids defy gravity. The secret is underneath their tanktops, a place like a mysterious coastal town: it isn't on any map & I can never get to it, but it's got a wonderful ice cream parlor. One glance makes me levitate off my barstool. People used to stare, & I wouldn't be able to explain. So now I carry my dictionary. It's got pictures. Under "supple," a sketch of a breast. "Inebriated": same thing. This is my favorite dictionary. And "perihelion": the point at which the Earth, in its ellipse, is closest to the sun - the biggest fire we know, a billion-degree breast. Due to the tilt of the planet's axis, the Northern Hemisphere at perihelion is gripped by winter (see "irony" (sketch of a breast)). Minneapolis, Tugunska, Oslo, steepled villages along the Rhine: all blizzarded at perihelion, when lovely barmaids tumble off the Earth. This dictionary weighs me down, keeps me on my barstool as behind me perihelion disappears in a marvelous curve.
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