Perfect moon

Moon pasted to the sky
reminds me of the circles
I used to draw with my compass
over and over,
pages of them,
while my math teacher mumbled
about parallelograms,
I spun that little silver man
around and around,
captivated by the assurance
that each circle was perfect
and when I read Plato years later
about how a perfect circle
defies a drawing
or even a definition,
I thought how sad philosophy can be
and that he perhaps didn’t spend enough time
staring at the moon.