Tonight the moon looks like I need glasses. I cup my hands around my personal pain, a warm mug full of slow poison. I grimace but savor it anyway. It’s ice they say making it hazy. Too far away to hear my howl. Many nights we all spent drinking late by the fire, a white pebble high above, my father king of the Irish goodbye. It is not lost on me, the cruel irony of his slipping quietly out of this life at 68. Up there a cold world, pale and furred with a ring of frost. Rainbow tinged even, if I look for more than a moment. Yet this thing in my hand absorbs me too fully, kindles for a moment the fire of resentment and ire in my belly. The unjust, the wicked who flourish like the bay tree – but even their faces are blurred. The burn persists. My myopia. Tonight the moon is the shape of my navel.