Linda Pastan

Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.

On nights when the moon seems impenetrable— a locked porthole to space; when the householder bars his windows and doors, and his dog lies until dawn, one jeweled eye open; when the maiden sleeps with her rosy knees sealed tightly together, on such nights the safecracker sets to work. Axe . . . Chisel . . . Nitroglycerin . . . Within the vault lie forty thousand tons of gold; the heaped up spoils of Ali Baba's cave; the secrets of the molecule. He sands his fingertips to feel the subtle vibrations of wheel lining up, just so, with wheel. His toolmarks are his fingerprints. And now a crack appears on the side of the egg, a single fault line, and within: the golden yolk just waiting. A kind of wind . . . a door flies open . . . a glitter of forsythia forced out of the branch. With smoothest fingertips you touch the locked cage of my ribs . . . just so. My knees fall open. And Cleopatra smiles, whose own Egyptians first invented the lock.

Even the flags seemed frozen to their poles, and the men stamping their well-shod feet resembled an army of overcoats. But we were young and fueled by hope, our ardor burned away the cold. We were the president’s, and briefly the president would be ours. The old poet stumbled over his own indelible words, his breath a wreath around his face: a kind of prophecy.

If there were a monument to silence, it would not be the tree whose leaves murmur continuously among themselves; nor would it be the pond whose seeming stillness is shattered by the quicksilver surfacing of fish. If there were a monument to silence, it would be you standing so upright, so unforgiving, your mute back deflecting every word I say.

We invent our gods the way the Greeks did, in our own image—but magnified. Athena, the very mother of wisdom, squabbled with Poseidon like any human sibling until their furious tempers made the sea writhe. Zeus wore a crown of lightning bolts one minute, a cloak of feathers the next, as driven by earthly lust he prepared to swoop down on Leda. Despite their power, frailty ran through them like the darker veins in the marble of these temples we call monuments. Looking at Jefferson now, I think of the language he left for us to live by. I think of the slave in the kitchen downstairs.

It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them. And so I smile, as if my own fidelity to sadness were a hidden vice— that downward tug on my mouth, my old suspicion that health and love are brief irrelevancies, no more than laughter in the warm dark strangled at dawn. Happiness. I try to hoist it on my narrow shoulders again— a knapsack heavy with gold coins. I stumble around the house, bump into things. Only Midas himself would understand.

1. THE SACRIFICE On this tile the knife like a sickle-moon hangs in the painted air as if it had learned a dance of its own, the way the boy has among the vivid breakable flowers, the way Abraham has among the boulders, his two feet heavy as stones. 2. NEAR SINAI God's hand here is the size of a tiny cloud, and the wordless tablets he holds out curve like the temple doors. Moses, reaching up must see on their empty surface laws chiseled in his mind by the persistent wind of the desert, by wind in the bulrushes. 3. THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT We know by the halos that circle these heads like rings around planets that the small donkey has carried his burden away from the thunder of the Old Testament into the lightning of the New. 4. AT THE ARMENIAN TILE SHOP Under the bright glazes Esau watches Jacob, Cain watches Abel. With the same heavy eyes the tilemaker's Arab assistant watches me, all of us wondering why for every pair there is just one blessing.

January Contorted by wind, mere armatures for ice or snow, the trees resolve to endure for now, they will leaf out in April. And I must be as patient as the trees— a winter resolution I break all over again, as the cold presses its sharp blade against my throat. February After endless hibernation on the windowsill, the orchid blooms— embroidered purple stitches up and down a slender stem. Outside, snow melts midair to rain. Abbreviated month. Every kind of weather. March When the Earl King came to steal away the child in Goethe’s poem, the father said don’t be afraid, it’s just the wind. . . As if it weren’t the wind that blows away the tender fragments of this world— leftover leaves in the corners of the garden, a Lenten Rose that thought it safe to bloom so early. April In the pastel blur of the garden, the cherry and redbud shake rain from their delicate shoulders, as petals of pink dogwood wash down the ditches in dreamlike rivers of color. May May apple, daffodil, hyacinth, lily, and by the front porch steps every billowing shade of purple and lavender lilac, my mother’s favorite flower, sweet breath drifting through the open windows: perfume of memory—conduit of spring. June The June bug on the screen door whirs like a small, ugly machine, and a chorus of frogs and crickets drones like Musak at all the windows. What we don’t quite see comforts us. Blink of lightning, grumble of thunder—just the heat clearing its throat. July Tonight the fireflies light their brief candles in all the trees of summer— color of moonflakes, color of fluorescent lace where the ocean drags its torn hem over the dark sand. August Barefoot and sun-dazed, I bite into this ripe peach of a month, gathering children into my arms in all their sandy glory, heaping my table each night with nothing but corn and tomatoes. September Their summer romance over, the lovers still cling to each other the way the green leaves cling to their trees in the strange heat of September, as if this time there will be no autumn. October How suddenly the woods have turned again. I feel like Daphne, standing with my arms outstretched to the season, overtaken by color, crowned with the hammered gold of leaves. November These anonymous leaves, their wet bodies pressed against the window or falling past— I count them in my sleep, absolving gravity, absolving even death who knows as I do the imperatives of the season. December The white dove of winter sheds its first fine feathers; they melt as they touch the warm ground like notes of a once familiar music; the earth shivers and turns towards the solstice.

On this first day of spring, snow covers the fruit trees, mingling improbably with the new blossoms like identical twins brought up in different hemispheres. It is not what Housman meant when he wrote of the cherry hung with snow, though he also knew how death can mistake the seasons, and if he made it all sound pretty, that was our misreading in those high school classrooms where, drunk on boredom, we had to recite his poems. Now the weather is always looming in the background, trying to become more than merely scenery, and though today it is telling us something we don't want to hear, it is all so unpredictable, so out of control that we might as well be children again, hearing the voices of thunder like baritone uncles shouting in the next room as we try to sleep, or hearing the silence of snow falling soft as a coverlet, even in springtime whispering: relax, there is nothing you can possibly do about any of this.

I am learning to abandon the world before it can abandon me. Already I have given up the moon and snow, closing my shades against the claims of white. And the world has taken my father, my friends. I have given up melodic lines of hills, moving to a flat, tuneless landscape. And every night I give my body up limb by limb, working upwards across bone, towards the heart. But morning comes with small reprieves of coffee and birdsong. A tree outside the window which was simply shadow moments ago takes back its branches twig by leafy twig. And as I take my body back the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap as if to make amends.