Backyard Pools

“I swam on the moon,”

you told me one day, while we held pinkies

and handed one another our secrets.

“What? How? How do you swim through rock or

in cheese, if you’re old fashioned?”

I asked his eyes of certainty,

his face of marble.

“Well, these geologists and NASAologists and whoever

is important in this world on other worlds

are all completely missing it. Completely.

They’re so convinced Mars or Mercury could hold water

that they’re completely looking past

our perma-cloud.” That hadn’t answered my what or how.

But I believed it.

I felt his hand wrap around my idea of truth

and wring it out. I was raining on the inside.
“What was it like?”

the watery words spilled from my mouth.

“There were great pools,

the colour of silver and dust.

They were like liquid statues in a museum of craters.”

“Will you go again?”

He traced the cliffs of his collarbones,

while I planned how to trace the fingerprints of luna

and dance on her freckles.

The air between us was a question mark,

hung like Christmas lights.

He had picked up on my whispers of hints but showed no wear of it:

A liquid statue.

 “Let’s go to Ganymede. I hope you like skating.”