Metamorphoses Of The Moon

Cold moons withdraw, refusing to come to terms

with the pilot who dares all heaven's harms

to raid the zone where fate begins,

flings silver gauntlet of his plane at space,

demanding satisfaction; no duel takes place:

the mute air merely thins and thins.

Sky won't be drawn closer: absolute,

it holds aloof, a shrouded parachute

always the same distance from

the falling man who never will abstain

from asking, but inventive, hopes; in vain

challenges the silent dome.

No violation but gives dividends

of slow disaster: the bitten apple ends

the eden of bucolic eve:

understanding breaks through the skull's shell

and like a cuckoo in the nest makes hell

for naïve larks who starve and grieve.

What prince has ever seized the shining grail

but that it turned into a milking pail?

It's likely that each secret sought

will prove to be some common parlor fake:

a craft with paint and powder that can make

cleopatra from a slut.

For most exquisite truths are artifice

framed in disciplines of fire and ice

which conceal incongruous

elements like dirty socks and scraps

of day-old bread and egg-stained plates; perhaps

such sophistry can placate us.

But yet the perverse imp within will probe

beneath the fringes of forbidden robe,

seduced by curiosity,

until in disenchantment our eyes glut

themselves on the clay toes and short clubfoot

which mar the idol's sanctity.

The choice between the mica mystery

of moonlight or the pockmarked face we see

through the scrupulous telescope

is always to be made: innocence

is a fairy-tale; intelligence

hangs itself on its own rope.

Either way we choose, the angry witch

will punish us for saying which is which;

in fatal equilibrium

we poise on perilous poles that freeze us in

a cross of contradiction, racked between

the fact of doubt, the faith of dream.