It was a serious question with me
driving a serious problem of a car after the moon,
my Escort pistons slogging
through 1.6 liters of fumy compression
reamed by now with use and abuse
to a lumpish, breathless 1.7 or more.

The moon lay hooked to the left,
concave from the wide western side
ten degrees up from the long five-lane hill,
about to drop more suddenly than it should
as always just as it grows in size, roses its gold
to larger than real, slips like a thorn sideways
through the darkened edges. It slid like the glisten of a wave
into the black rising fog of trees.

I had seen the lights of the climbing hill down
to creek-level and subdivision entrances left and right,
back up past the pond with a rangy swan who stayed (God
knows) with highway sizzling to the south,
some proper human family to the north,
who monitored the scum, sifted the algae and gathering goop
in such a large, loud town.

Tonight they streamed toward me from the places
where they were fixed, and then where they moved
with, toward, and away from me
at the speed I drove not looking at the driving,
but caught by that moon hanging with the other lights,
the bright black street whose lines
and glinting travelers just this once
did not look alien, did not call down
romantic, rural taunts. I saw the lighted thoroughfare
be like a clean river, a blind and perfect singer.

I turned home for my camera, but when I drove
back east up Powder Springs Road
to catch my sight again, or what was left,
I saw it gone, even the other lights
gone slack, lost shine.

I hurried to get up the western hill, over the next,
along the curve, and then reversed, trying
to figure some angle, past the QT,
the gas-pump night store, around the bend toward
and then away from the state park, the Kolb Farm, near
my landlord's house, where I have gone
to pay my rent. Near the darker turns and longer drive
where I had tried to dump my gentlest dog
so he could live a little longer, though not with me.
I passed a church whose black block letters read,
HE WHO STANDS FOR NOTHING WILL FALL FOR ANYTHING,
and I took it personally.

..........................For the moon
was gone as I had been less quick than I might've,
dawdling with speed limits, politeness, weakening
engine, oil smudge rising from my transport
to smear the sky of someone behind me, always
watching me, taking my license number, losing it,
or I'd have been in jail years ago
for atmospheric littering.

...........................That sky
I wanted to keep, give someone,
serve myself sometime when the moment
would have wisped within my memory. I drove
for minutes, not hours or days, to catch the moon.
I glimpsed it slip its darkening gold
below my eyes' hope. I'm sure
it kicked a little left as it entered wherever it did,
like a diver scooping herself
with an arched back beneath the surface, drawing
bubbles and some finely ruddered thought
of bucking, tensing, swooping under pressure
of the fall, and water.

The next day my daughter said,
"You're not old old, like other people,
because you've done some things." I have
no idea what things she means, what she thinks they are.
But that doesn't matter, for she has said
just something without curve, a reflex of love.

Now, before I'm gone, I have been the moon
cutting the surface of something in open space,
dark substance, long away, slowing,
for the briefest time, a swelling light among lights,
a hanging curve, a surge within something else,
a disappearance, a swoop in a place where even one breath
is more precious than thought.