A Virgilian Moon

                            A Virgilian Moon

Only the hint of the hump

Of a camel

The moon’s become tonight

Behind a wall of cloud. When, suddenly

It flashes half a face

Bur vanishes again

Like Dido in the other world, the clouds surrounding it

Turing into Oriental temple dragons, circles

Of Halloween yellow–and–brown

By some abstract expressionist, now like a pack

Of small stray dogs

Pursuing their own tails, a deer in flight. Abruptly,

The round moon blazes, white

As bone, alone

In a dark sky. The ancients were right-

The moon’s a woman

And if I knew the words I’d pray to her tonight

In gratitude for my wife asleep

Whose body is another sky

Like the softness and the secrets of a summer’s night.

Pail Carroll, Poems, 1988