31 Moon poems

I Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, — And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy? II Thou chosen sister of the Spirit, That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ...

wolf moon No moon in sight, so I howled at the exit sign instead. Red runes, electric. Telling an old story of escape, of wind, a wide cold. A distant car alarm. Otherwise: the dark, and our bodies, two strange women trying to touch each other. Breathing strange. Moving toward or away from each other as the red ghost in the sky opened, called us gone, showed us the door to another world. Otherwise, the dark, and our mouths, tearing at what bones we could find. Grinning and hungry for something — something we couldn’t, with all our words, name. snow moon The magic where the streetlights turn the snow pink lasts only for the first night, the same way, maybe, a blanket loses track of its scent when it’s been touched by too many hands, or the way a body grays when too many feet have dragged their cigarettes and complaints through it. But for that one first night, everything cold- flecked and whispering was ours, the pink light ours, sent from some other world so we could, for a night, feel untouched. So we could feel like sugar—crumbling, and perfect for it. worm moon Like any girl, I pulled myself into shreds to test the rumor that something with blood like mine could be halved and still whole. And what did I learn? I buried myself all over the garden, but the pieces only sprouted into new riddles: squid leg, spaghetti squash, a jerking thumb. Their names still sounded like mine; everyone in the same dress, chewing dirt to avoid each others’ eyes. I lay down next to the one beneath the porch, hiding among the oyster shells.Don’t cry, I said, but she cried anyway. Her tears fell straight into my eyes. What a lesson—to watch them float back and forth between us until we knew each one’s shape. Until we knew, finally, what to do with them. pink moon Outside, the colors leapt from the trees. Here, inside, some new word was blooming in my underwear—darker than I’d expected. I’d expected something pink; a slow, sweet trickle. Not this wet tar, treacle, dark, like the blood had been stretching inside me for years, slow-building into a sticky chord, the first falling away. Soil’s been watered; come play. First stuck, first gum, first hum of pollen, calling in the bees and readying to wilt. flower moon Spring is the season of crying and seeing nothing. Of choking up on someone else’s trash. Barbed tennis balls that lodge wherever air’s supposed to go, nasal cavity homewreckers. All spring my lenses wrenched themselves from my eyes, jumped ship, spore-lined and furious. Everything melted and ran down my face. All the trees wanted my number. Sent fuzzy messengers to murmur in my ears:I get so afraid sometimes all I want all I want is. All spring I brushed confessions out of my hair. Tore the little letters apart and locked myself in the refrigerator, until the world promised to stop birthing such soft things. strawberry moon The house was filled with the smell of it, the last misshapen, sweet-heavy berries of the season losing their shapes on the stove. The house was filled with the smell of fruit unbecoming, fruit pulled to its knees at fire’s feet. All summer long, the bushes had whispered take me, shown us all the places we could kiss if we wanted. And so, as the light died, we put our mouths on the least lovable, the too-full, the easy-bruised, we shouted,I choose you, and you, and you, and you, and canned that hunger, and spooned it into our mouths on the coldest days. buck moon Some of the cloven-hoofed things are good at leaping from one rock shelf to another without shattering. Good, in other words, at falling. I never trusted that ankles were any match for my body’s insistence on becoming earth again. So when I found myself on the cliff face, I knew it was dive or dust. A boy called to me from the bottom of the gorge, called me all the names he knew, and I stood frozen, wearing a crown of bones. The gravel laughed as it fled from my feet. I shouted down to the boy,Don’t try to milk me unless you’re fond of being kicked — buck and bray and jawbone. He responded,No, totally, sounds tough, how are you feeling? sturgeon moon I hid in his rivers and estuaries. I ate his wet earth’s crops. I grew plump for him. Grew egg-lined, thirty tiny hearts in my belly, fruit thumping with seeds. He pulled me from the mud. Laid me out in the sun. Opened me down the center. Scraped every dead daughter from my silly maw. I learned better next time. Next time, I grew three extra rows of seeds. Hid them in my mouth. Sharpened them to teeth. harvest moon Last winter, when we finally kissed under fluorescent lights, that was the seed we pressed between the ground’s lips. Then I laughed when the sky collapsed into pathetic rivers. Then I drank the dirt through my hooves, and liked it. Then I ate all the sun I could find. Though the weeds claw, sugar-starved, at my thighs. Though the sky casts over, cataract, callous, and the earth fumes as iron claws uproot the children’s children we keep warm in our bellies. Still, when the moon and the horses are fat on the horizon, still you’ll find me, arms heavy with eggplant, chard, tomatoes bruised blue, blushing kohlrabi till the kohlrabi’s gone. Will you pluck me before the dust does, root and all, radicchio tendon? I promise, I’ll feed no upright animal. Only the bees and the bees, beans sitting on the squash’s face. Will you turn your palms to the sky? Will you turn your palms to the prayer hunger makes? Will you feed and feed, and lick the bowl clean when we’re both full? hunter’s moon I picked up my own scent somewhere on the forest’s edge. Spoiling flour, holy basil, sweat. My oldest smell is the smell that still clings to pajama sleeves late into Saturday afternoon. Toothpaste, mixed with the musk of rest. I pressed my snout to the ground and breathed deep, watched the tendrils of my slug trail bloom blue, bioluminescent. I followed the maze, pushbrooming forest floor with face, followed the promise of a rapid heart. Don’t ask who’s the bloodhound, who’s the hare, when there’s a chase to be made: the clarity of a cardinal direction clicking into place. And: the quickening—the tendons that appear, sudden, when the distant, rabid howl of hunters rolls across the tree line, and you lift your head in greeting. beaver moon We made our home in the place where the water slowed. Yes. We flooded the plains until the landscape bloomed with wet. We stopped the tub. We drew a bath and called the river to its new, quieter life. Ring-builders. Kingdom carved. At the end of the line, we made our own place. Sure, from above, it looks like a snaking tail, headed by a circle. From here, in the mud, it doesn’t look like that at all. It looks like a world. Like a cleared space. Like everything that’s left when the trees soften and come, at last, crashing. cold moon Back below the ice. Back to swim. Seastar. Creeping brine. We salt, sink. We pull down the cold. We pull the moon to our floor.      Hello.      Waterstone. Brinicle. Cold-blooded and still flesh.    Still    horned    fingers groping the kelp bed. Still salt. Pull. Everything the ice touches. Is ours. Is quiet now. We sink slow. We pray still. For moon. We answer it now. Ourselves.

Full the blow to a gong —gone blind with the sight of white Silk, O milk of my reason— sun reseen in My mad mad mirror. Gibbous Sense Less science: the Wish-apparition of a perfect fact. As thought, the war Of one upon one. Half Half a mind almost mine. Whole fragment, I am A being from another word. Crescent Bow bent back—to what release? My lone line, the join of all I am not. A minor truth betrays A major one— A lore for the lyre. For it is written:liar with a why. New Calling all coincidence, I will Deem the dark my day. Yet—if I say I am lying, I am lying To you now. O zero raised to zero—I am lying with you now.

Perfect disc of moon, huge and simmering low on the capital’s filthy horizon— ¡Ay, qué luna más hermosa! she says pushing the stroller slowly down Atocha. And gorgeous too the firm-thighed boys from Lisbon a block away, who work Kilometer Zero’s sidewalk, the neon shoestore they lean against cupping the flames of passing strangers. The sky above Puerta del Sol turns a darker shade of blue. Who says it doesn’t become night’s one eye as it scales the heavens, paling and shrinking before it moves across a late June sky? And below, men persist and circle the plaza, twin fountains brimming over their brilliant waters. Hours from now with the heat waning, the same moon will spot the figure of him making past Neptune, the Ritz the orange jumpsuits hopping off trucks to sweep and spray, hosing down those electric streets.

For Conchita García Lorca Moon came to the forge in her petticoat of nard The boy looks and looks the boy looks at the Moon In the turbulent air Moon lifts up her arms showing — pure and sexy — her beaten-tin breasts Run Moon run Moon Moon If the gypsies came white rings and white necklaces they would beat from your heart Boy will you let me dance — when the gypsies come they’ll find you on the anvil with your little eyes shut Run Moon run Moon Moon I hear the horses’ hoofs Leave me boy! Don’t walk on my lane of white starch The horseman came beating the drum of the plains The boy at the forge has his little eyes shut Through the olive groves in bronze and in dreams here the gypsies come their heads riding high their eyelids hanging low How the night heron sings how it sings in the tree Moon crosses the sky with a boy by the hand At the forge the gypsies cry and then scream The wind watches watches the wind watches the Moon Translated from the Spanish

And like a dying lady, lean and pale, Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil, Out of her chamber, led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, The moon arose up in the murky East, A white and shapeless mass.

i For Laurita, my sister’s friend The moon is dead dead — it will come back to life in the spring when a south wind ruffles the brow of the poplars when our hearts yield their harvest of sighs when the roofs wear their grass hats The moon is dead dead — it will come back to life in the spring ii For Isabelita, my sister The evening sings a lullaby to the oranges My little sister sings “the earth is an orange” The moon weeping says “I want to be an orange” You can’t be — my dear — even if you turn pink or a little bit lemon How sad! Translated from the Spanish

Under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist.

That field nag, old-penny swayback. Low hawk, to ducks in train to a quad of geese, in case. Last night, the long moon lay it seemed a tissue of snow, but then dawn told that wasn't so. Late morning, now, the fire, the hearth, eggs sitting for the mute plate and fork, this pen making a thing of them. Two more nights— waterfowl safe and noisy in the dusk, the low rails running flank to the river at midnight—find what they'll make of that river, this moon.

Mid-sentence, we remembered the eclipse, Arguing home through our scant patch of park Still warm with barrel wine, when none too soon We checked the hour by glancing at the moon, Unphased at first by that old ruined marble Looming like a monument over the hill, So brimmed with light it seemed about to spill, Then, there! We watched the thin edge disappear— The obvious stole over us like awe, That it was our own silhouette we saw, Slow perhaps to us moon-gazing here (Reaching for each other's fingertips) But sweeping like a wing across that stark Alien surface at the speed of dark. The crickets stirred from winter sleep to warble Something out of time, confused and brief, The roosting birds sang out in disbelief, The neighborhood's stray dogs began to bark. And then the moon was gone, and in its place, A dim red planet hung just out of reach, As real as a bitter orange or ripened peach In the penumbra of a tree. At last We rose and strolled at a reflective pace Past the taverna crammed with light and smoke And people drinking, laughing at a joke, Unaware that anything had passed Outside in the night where we delayed Sheltering in the shadow we had made.