Few poems begin by insulting the moon, but Mike Stone's does exactly that. "The moon rose like a bloated stomach" drags the traditional symbol of romance down into something swollen, bodily and faintly sickening. The rest of the poem is the slow undoing of that first impression. By the final line the speaker is sitting "at peace" under the stars. The central idea is that calm does not have to come from beauty. It can come from accepting the bare, dry facts of death and decay.
The setting does a lot of this work. The Dead Sea carries its grim name into the poem, and Stone adds "salt mists" to it. Salt suggests preservation and barrenness, a place where little can live. Into this landscape come the bats, and the verb Stone gives them is a surprise: they "flew singing over my head." Bats are usually creepy, and they are not really singers, but the word turns their eerie, high-pitched noise into music. That small shift prepares the poem's real movement, from the grotesque toward something almost tuneful.
The middle of the poem makes that movement visible. The bloated, living-looking stomach gives way to "the dry white bone." Where the first image was wet and heavy, this one is clean, hard and bleached. Stone then compares the bone to "a wood flute," and the comparison is odd and clever. Bone and wood are different materials, but both are pale, light and hollow, and the flute links the image back to the bats' singing. A dead thing becomes an instrument, something that could make sound. The poem is unclear about whether the bone is the moon, now risen and shrunk to a pale shape in the sky, or a real bone lying on the sand "beside me." The line "Beside me" suggests the second, and I think the blur is deliberate. Sky and ground, moon and skeleton, merge into one image of whiteness.
The shape of the poem on the page supports this. The first stanza has three fairly long lines, and the poem then tapers: two lines, two lines, two lines, and finally a single line, "In the star-eyed desert." The poem seems to exhale and settle as it goes. There is no regular meter and no fixed rhyme scheme, but sound is used carefully. "Bone" and "Shone" sit together and echo each other, though whether they fully rhyme depends on the reader's accent. "Me" and "peace" are linked by their long vowel. The phrase "dry white bone" puts three stressed syllables in a row, so the reader has to slow down. Then "Shone" is left alone on its own line, a single held beat that works like the light itself.
The speaker's posture matters too. To sit "on my haunches" is to sit like an animal, low and alert, close to the ground. He has stopped being a visitor looking at the scene and become part of it, as much a creature of the desert as the bats. That helps explain why "at peace" sounds believable and not sentimental. Stone does not say the desert has become beautiful. He lets the speaker rest in it as it is. The last image, "star-eyed," gives the sky a kind of watchful gaze, but it is a quiet one, and nothing in it judges or threatens.
The poem is significant because of how much it does in so few words. It takes images we expect to feel afraid of, such as a bloated body, a bone, a sea called dead and a flock of bats, and arranges them so that fear drains away. Death here is not a tragedy to be lamented but a landscape to be sat in. The poem also shows how a simile can change the way we see. The moon starts as a swollen stomach and ends as the pale instrument of a quiet music, and the reader's feeling changes with it, from unease to a surprising calm.