The moon keeps appearing in surprising places. I’ve seen it pre-dawn in the east trapped in branches strung with dew. Last night it seemed to rise in the West. And I haven’t seen it overhead in a long while. If it fell into my pocket would I even recognize it among the dimes and five-cent buffalos? I went to school, for awhile, I read the books and took the tests and traced the oval diagrams. How can it be that I have lost touch and cannot tell you if the moon moves in the same or different direction from the sun? The sky has held winter for so long I seem to look up only at the edges of the day, and so I forget: I don’t know who is rotating around whom. A long time ago they established that one of us is standing still, and one is spinning, and we all learned a lesson in humility. Surely if the orbits changed they would tell me, and the world would be in tears.
In this version the woman reads no books. She wades in the water, she has many minds shaped like the moon, and at the edges of the desert, tulips bloom.
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