BRENDAN GALVIN

MOONSCAPE WITH ZIPMART AND HERON

Next morning, in one of the many Pinevilles

there are, its stripmall boulevards going

all night with gassed-up kid cars chirping rubber,

he repacked his own car in the motel lot, just as

a blue heron, flying north, drew its vestigial silence

across the air, giving shape and a sign

to the morning, trailing its banner of evanescence

above the orange ZipMart that was still lit like

some techno-colony on the dry Mare Imbrium,

and gassing up, heading north himself,

he saw a line was there above those gas pumps,

the demarcation of two cloud banks, but as though

mapping that great blue's passage: a hint, he believed,

of the tenacity in passing gristle and bone, being

somewhat bone and gristle himself, and not of the dust

inherent in orange cement-block bunkers.

First published in TRP’s 25th Anniversary issue, Fall 2003; copyright © 2003 by Tar River Poetry.

All rights reserved.