Beaver Moon Sestina

All the rivers on the moon are dammed.
Their labor done, the lunar race
of beavers, walking upright, cradling their children
in their arms, return to homes they built
from native trees. They lounge along their ponds,
their flat tails absorbing warmth from the vagrant sun.

This is what, in 1835, the New York Sun
reported: The Moon’s an Eden of naturally dammed
waterways, virgin forests, snowcapped mountains, ponds
so clear John Herschel saw their bottoms with his telescope. A race
of man-bats shares the skies with strange birds that build
strange nests in old-growth trees. The beaver children

play beside the unpolluted water. Like human children,
they do not want to leave, not yet, not until the sun
goes down, please, Mother, we are busy building
little lodges to play house in, imaginary dams
across imaginary rivers. Two boys begin to race
across a verdant field. The finish line’s a farther pond.

In 1835, in America, transcendental northern ponds
are cooked to steam to run the mills in which the children
of the poor grow old. Below the dam, the tailrace
festers. Every day but Sunday,
they walk the path along the pond, across the wooden dam,
and into the hot and crowded building

where great machines gnash and yaw. They are building
America, these children, and they will grow to understand a pond
as a providential instrument of industry, a dam
as the righteous exercise of Man’s dominion. These children
will, in time, become adults who feel the sun
falls differently on them, who feel the taxonomy of races

is an index of god-blessedness. But back to the racing
beaver boys: they’re stopped now, watching the sunset build
above the pond. The air gets cooler as the sun
recedes. A bluish orb shimmers on the surface of the pond.
The boys look up. Do you think, one says, that children
live up there? No way, the other says, and throws a stick beyond the dam.

Where the raceway enters the pond,
the boys build a shelter and imagine they are solar children.
In their pretend, they dam up every river on the sun.

Read more from Issue 22.1.