The Pleasures of: Episode 3

The Moon

Can you not?

Sometimes he is a skull, old and blind and dead, an idiot god grinning stupid and cruel down at the earth, wishing for a body.

(I wrote a poem about this years ago. It envisioned the moon growing body and raping the earth. I have long since lost it; nobody much liked it but me.)

And sometimes a woman, pale and lovely and cold and cruel. Observing but indifferent.

What strange minds live within her cold light?

And the skull Man walked upon, that pretended to be a desert?

The moon, pale and lovely and cold and cruel.

Bajo la luna gitana,
las cosas le estan mirando
y ella no puede mirarlas.

And here is my own much less worthy (in fact, somewhat embarrassing) contribution.

(If I were to rewrite it today, I would delete most of the beginning and simply write, "It is a thousand years later, and the old man steps out of the shadows." None of this business about Pittsburgh or little girls or first-person narration. The point of the story is the riddle, can you guess it?)

Pale and lovely and cruel and cold. And old, and blind, and dead.