from Coins from the Coins in Stories.

The reverse is also true:
Gasparro was his name
xxxxxwhen asked
to commemorate a woman
he drew an eagle the same
eagle over surface of moon
of the splayed
eagle of the men
xxxxxrocketed to
the moon the mission
position the insignia
brief theatrics
xxxxxif you have to ask
who now, how this otherwise
great phase of bird
came to be—

But also as a boy I traced
birds extinct—a progress
tracking the curves
of the scene of the
xxxxxEarth as I saw fit
coins traced, circling above
circling silver
xxxxxdollars beyond dollars
across scraps of newspaper
as wheels, as planets
like two glances
toward Saturn and Mars
(I say furtive)(You don’t say)
in no way similarly
extended in a history

***

Terence Huber’s recent work appears in Juked and Dead Housekeeping.  He was a winner of Great Lakes Review’s First Annual Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize.  He writes and shines pennies near freshwaters of the Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail.