Open Up, Moon

It’s not been fifty years
since men landed on the moon,
kicked up and brought home
a bucket of chalky, asteroid-shorn rocks.
Twenty-nineteen is fifty years,
and a lot of cardboard boxes.
The moon could’ve grown some hair
and lost it in that time.  Could’ve
grown some heirs, if we hit it
with a missile, or if an under-the-
influence-of-solar dust comet hit it
head-on.  I couldn’t possibly be happy
if the moon turned fifty, could I?
Fat old cheese-grinned mothball, staring
down and grinning at me, as I tried to sleep
tentless in the backyard at age forty?  I’d
like to take a piece of floss up there and
clean his moldy green teeth, see how he likes it.