WHERE'S THE MOON, THERE'S THE MOON A Story for Children (the opening) 1. If I look to the opposite shore and greet myself there, if I call out to myself come here and watch myself laboriously construct from shore-things a boat, and watch myself over the waters come rowing, but, crossing the midpoint between shores, out in the middle of the colorless lake, no longer approaching, no longer coming closer, disappear, where am I now, has my boat capsized? 2. Infinite capacity for love in the smallest detail; infinite suffering in the innermost reality; large mind in even the dumbest, mutest object; destiny in an object that stands still; heart in the middle of the grey, motionless water; the largest sadness in the world in a groaning buoy; in a buoy and the bird overhead, huge sadness, and yet I hop from place to place as though I'm weightless. 3. When I picture my father I see the surface of the moon, plains of moon-stuff, chalk-dust papers shredded by a paper-shredder, snowbanks of shredded paper, nobody to organize it all, no way to "moralize the day out of its aimlessness," nobody with a Shop-Vac handy slowly to turn the whiteness into pattern and form, revealing, as a chisel reveals in the marble, a figure, a woman's figure, an expression of bliss-- 4. Now that that big nonentity the moon is in my mind the clichés for representing earth are hereby banished-- a hundred open-ended poems, abrupt transitions, high tones grating against the low, unsorted experience; sex beside the holy man defiled by sex, the pig pile of ways you can get high, right there beside the dawn and how you badly want to kill yourself, the fleer, the road that unravels like a banner before him-- 5. And the child's attention fixed upon the animal book, and all the animals in the book intent upon dinner or eyeing some harbinger cloud forever, permanently dejected because some little stone turned their child to stone, weeping big mule or owl tears as though the child never turned the page, the sun never shone again bringing larkspurs, gentian, and the mule-boy reunited with mule mommy and daddy just in time to end, 6. but the mule on page four will always be sad, the owl overhead will always mourn for the mule in his sadness, nobody will ever bring news of page eleven when mule-boy returns from the dead, and the child reading the book will always preside like a sinister god over these animals, always dipping in and out of their moods like a snacker, a little sadness to tide you over until suppertime, a little elegiac owl, some time at the grief picnic .