I am the moon, that eye high in the sky you thought

followed you when you were a child.

I wasn’t following you but I was watching you, all right.

You were right to suspect as much.

I saw you in your girlhood bed, a book tented open, you, ten,

squinting in the diffused white light of my gaze,

the black words like ants on the page.

I saw your father asleep in the next room, his snores easily drowning out the sound

of your mother beside him,

with her light hesitant breaths like vapor.

I saw your neighbor’s cat kill seven birds in one night;

the last one – a grackle – did not die immediately

but trembled in extremis,

and I saw my own reflection in its beady black eye with its rapidly nictitating eyelid,

the cat standing over it bathed in my light,

nonchalantly licking the blood from her paws.

Across town at the grade school my stare falls on the flying swings and teeter totters

and monkey bars, which affrightedly throw their shadows onto the asphalt

speckled with the picked scabs and stray hairs

of forty years worth of elementary school students.

I see the spot, over by the old deserted bathroom with its drift of ancient dead leaves and used condoms,

the stain much faded but still visible, though no longer as blood,

much less yours.

When I am full,

I see the small white oval of your face

turned up to return my stare,

your brown eye searching my white.