The Man in the Moon

- Billy Colins

He used to frighten me int he nights of childhood,

the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft.

I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness.

But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads

I see him sinking behind stands of winter tress

and rising again to show his familiar face.

And when he comes into full view over open fields

he looks like a young man who has fallen in love

with the dark earth,

a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy,

his round mouth open

and if he had just broken into song.