The Moon Has a Head But No Body

So why assume [she]

Is cold why not

Assume drunk

“Legless”

Can keep up pretty good though

With your car in the rural night

You are a passenger

Your left leg lolls and

Your friend reaches a hand

Across the emergency brake

Which points now at the base of

The gearstick shaft

And can point at its head

But nowhere else

Thus does not

“Speak”

And unless overused abused is

Reliable

Whereas anyone can misunderstand

Or willfully misinterpret the

Point and represent

Are very different (Moon!)

6am and the snow

Sent enough light upward

For this window to

Transmit and permit

My seeing

I heard more than I saw

I understood less than I heard

I was well read compared to

But not compared to

I begin to feel warm in

My crotch, as if a wodge

Of moist electric blanket

Were stuck in there

And my friend was not

Riding on the other side of the brake

—I mean emergency—he is not

Fox-hunting and on

A horse in a novel

In which the brake

Is a strip of greenwood

He is downstairs the coffee’s

Made but he ignores

My text He works alone

And I will have to go down there

Copyright Credit: Catherine Wagner, "The Moon Has a Head But No Body." Copyright © 2015 by Catherine Wagner. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network.

Source: PoetryNow (PoetryNow, 2015)