We hear the shot. It sounds so answer-like
To where the Good had gone from ‘night, Mother.
Nineteen eighty-three, evening in summer,
When Jessie asks for Daddy’s gun, dignified
And dreamlike and childlike: she is engulfed.
“It’s not for him,” she says. “It’s for me.”
And thus Mama’s tears are disbelieved
And throat-caught and fought with eyes puffed
Up and pulsing with love and hate, with dawns
Ablaze and dark. But she’s already gone.
Vanished to her bedroom, door locked, selfish or
-less or -satisfied. I cannot be sure.
But I know I saw when Goodnight Moon flew
To dark like destiny, up and out of view.
Oh, I know I saw when Goodnight Moon flew
Into the dark like destiny, upon a draft
Shot through that unfilled two-inch hellish gap
Between legers of the self: notebooks
In stacks with pages stained by dust and sweat
Which clutch the ever-shifting tremble of my hands,
The same that Time enwrapped with sick demands,
That rifled and thieved through my father’s shelves;
That twitch like eyelids struck by rays enrapt,
That once leant Goodnight Moon against that gap.
I did not wish the book would float away
Upon that draft. Then only night remained.
A stasis broken by the doting stars,
Gone wide enough to interrupt the dark.
A stasis broken by stars gone lengthwise
Wide enough to interrupt that lonely Night;
Who knew that onliness would crack with only light?
I could not, for mine were Jessie’s eyes.
I have since lost them. I will not find that stasis.
I think I saw it float away today,
Upon another draft, and only I remained.
In my own green room I lie in bed awake
And stare at bears in chairs and a painting;
At Bunny, who sleeps now only after naming
His world; at a moonrise that blues the Night
As if the Good-, Good-, Good- could make it daylike.
I still hear the shots sometimes, on Good
And Bad Nights. But now, I see the Moon.
