"Don't the Moon Look Like an Asshole?"

 

**** on the grounds of McLean Hospital -- a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston.

I was walking with a patient who was in my poetry group at McLean Hospital one evening, when he looked up at the night sky, saw a vivid moon, and asked me " Don't the moon look like an asshole?" And indeed, this disheveled man, certainly no man of letters, came up with the best metaphor he could. He gave me a radiant smile, which I returned. The moon was not his Byronic mistress, but for him it was not the 'butt of jokes' but poetry. He did not --"go a roving late at night," the moon did not ride on some luminescent wave--but for him it walked in beauty in the night.