Somewhere on the moon is a picnic basket.
You leaned against the black monolith
and I leaned against the crashed capsule.
We ate a meal of heart-shaped sandwiches.
It is so bright on the moon that your pupils turn to pinpricks
and the stars vanish.
So you can understand why it was hard to see you
against the monolith,
against the infinity draped along the lambent lunar curve.
We put on our star goggles to see clearer.
I showed you the fire the wise men followed.
You pointed out the comet that would boil away the oceans.
We watched the earth appear.
When I tried to put it in my pocket,
you stopped me,
saying it would only end up on my shoulders.
You gave me the mountains of Tibet, instead.
“Start small,” you said.
The line where the light side meets the dark is so distinct
it looks as though it were painted there
with the ashes of every hopeful campfire.
We danced back and forth through light and shadow
like a car weaving at high speed down a forgotten highway
where laws were too lazy to get up off the porch.
After a while I grew to love being dizzy with you.
On the moon, even the most serious things
weigh less than a golf ball.
In our hurry to catch the train back to Earth
we forgot the picnic basket
and several other heart-shaped things.
I still see them now and again, as though through a telescope.
The secret of the moon is that there is air there,
but only for a time.