Shine On, You Moons of Jupiter

Bess, the landlord’s daughter

should cover the begonia of blood on the musket,

put her hair up into a bun and descend;

walk out alone on the Little Mermaid’s legs

still singing, whether on crag, tide, or sea foam with her sisters.

I walk, singing, too

knower, agent, doer, done.

It could kill me:

the brokenhearted sacrificing stars,

the silence of a wind-abraded

winter-shortened, virtueless

craggy human family, story.

a heritage of slights embedded in the sky.

All I have is sniper thinking;

I am calling out from between the rocks.

To solve the dilemma of my moral levy,

I accept innocence and faith;

more is required: doubt.

If reason is valuable then these are my reasons

and they belong to me.

If I practise ethics,

then mercy to women, those proud moons of Jupiter.

I will not shout at you, not a one

though your quandaries be more than war

though you are but rogues, off orbit, you are moral.

You don’t need to petition me to find wonder.

Donny Osmond’s smile on my bedroom wall

put me in a state of faith.

My girlfriend would run away

to the Osmonds’s home,

their butterscotch eyes, their harmony:

why wouldn’t they welcome her?

He was pious in Joseph’s Dreamcoat

shrieking about a return to family,

but, Donny’s teeth were pearls, sea foam, something of true wonder.

Whiter than a wedding cake, neo-gothic house

on the escarpment in Lévis

after I disembarked from the ferry—

the wind and waves in smithereens of heaven—

I alone, freewheeling, walking in the light.

Whiter than the San Jose Observatory

where Himalia and other moons were found

where I looked up at the pavilion of private stars.

Whiter than my incandescent inner voice,

which is my outer voice,

moral, divine because I say so.