Portside

Eclipse

After the 4th course and 5th bottle of wine,

my wife, my friends, & I stumbled onto

the porch, just in time to see Earth

take its first bite of the moon's mottled bleu.

Someone said the full moon always

reminded him of a guy with bad acne,

Tommy Lee Jones perhaps.

I said it reminded me of my boss,

the pocked inventor of the tetrahedral spike,

a clever little gadget

you could drop from an unseen B-52

into rice paddies miles below

and which always landed point up

ready to pierce boot, sandal or naked foot.

He was proud to have served his country

in such a demonstrably harmful way.

I wondered if the moon was disappearing

in Vietnam as well.  Total eclipses are local events

like divorce and heart attack.  Maybe

they were just having a chest cold over there.

That’s when I mentioned the murdered woman.

She'd lived in the next apartment with her husband

or boyfriend, whatever he was.  They were both refugees.

At night my wife and I would lie in bed and listen

to her body slam against our bedroom wall.

Next day she'd say they were discussing their future.

I heard my wife telling about the murder,

things police want to know.

Who gave him the gun.  How he tracked her down.

Why we didn’t report the beatings.

Not why it’s easier to see the big picture,

millions of kilotons, millions of  casualties.

Or why when you’re that close to suffering

you often look away.

The dance of planets continued

until the eclipse was full. 

The darkened moon didn't look like cheese anymore

or someone's cratered face but like an innocent rock

hurled from who knows what distance

at some unsuspecting target.

Lee Rossi’s latest book is Wheelchair Samurai.  His poems have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Poetry Northwest and The North American Review, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.  His interviews and reviews can be found on thepedestalmagazine.com and Poetry Flash.  He lives in northern California.