Flooding the Moon

It’s nothing, this rain
unidentifiably
changing to snow on

a shelf we can’t quite
reach. The years, child, the
years, some old man, his

hands warped into curved
doves, says, in the voice
of the boy he once

was. The sky and its
frozen stars compose
something of a fuselage.

You know the sound a
thing makes when it’s dead
set on crashing? It’s

inevitable now. Like
the time I dreamed a
beached whale was breathing

in my yard in the
Midwest. It cast a
shadow through my front door

and windows. But the next day
was so ordinary. I watched
my once plush lawn grow

brittle under the blazing
sun. I just wished I
could have exhaled the breath

of a thing that large.
An animal that isn’t going
anywhere that I’m not going.

David Dodd Lee is the author of ten books of poems, including Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014) and two books of Ashbery erasure poems. He is also a visual artist. Lee lives in Indiana, on Baugo Bay.