...I laugh / and cry for every turn of the world...

—William Stafford, from the title poem of his book Why I Am Happy (Paper Crane Press, 1998)

The moon, showing its round nature only between parenthetic extremes, helps me interpret the world’s ways: the constant mechanics of Newtonian gravity; the revelatory evolution of relativity; the mores of planetary systems of dance; the earth’s reason for turning her smitten cheeks; how constellations code the DNA of interstellar black matter; why surface tension makes spheres of my salt-riven tears; how stars invert their patterns onto the curved screen of my optic nerves; why I don this crescent smile to greet the newly-risen sun.

—This prose poem was inspired by the epigraph above.

Bio: Roy Beckemeyer