Moon Landings

The moon on television never errs,
and shares the worker's fear of immigration,
a strange white goddess imprisoned in her ash,
entombed Etruscan, smiling though immortal.
We've clocked the moon; it goes from month to month
bleeding us dry, buying less and less...
chassis orbiting about the earth,
grin of heatwave, spasm of stainless steel,
gadabout with heart of chalk, unnamable
void and cold thing in the universe,
lunatic's pill with poisonous side effects,
body whose essence is its excess baggage,
compressed like a Chinese dried caterpillar...
our hallucinator, the disenchantress.

Robert Lowell (from History)