31 Moon poems

And then came the ten moons Full in the sun’s glare, and the seraphim, And it was light all night in the orchards And on the plains and even in the towns And mankind rejoiced, because it was now the case That the wrecking and equivocating could carry on The pale night long. Mankind rejoiced And went forth to those places twelve hours of light Had not made it worth the while to despoil And gamboled collectively on the cliff tops And regarded the night-broiling of the sea Hitherto forbidden, but now opened in festival. Half the world’s time unpeeled and exposed So fruit might ripen faster and trees flourish higher And forced photosynthesis green all the land. Then night ramblers, night-sun-worshippers, Night-motorists fanned out and made the most Of spectral light, which bleached out stars and even The cozy old moon herself, who had Once held a sickle broadside to the sun, and now Was a hollow daytime shadow. Only a few old believers slept Hand in hand, shoulder to breast, As if their lives depended on it, knowing yet That the morning would bring nothing Because the day knew no beginning And had no end.

I Every year the moon inches away from us. In time she’ll swim too far out to anchor us at our habitual angle to the sun, and that will be the end of the well-tempered and recursive wildness that conceived and suffered us, and that will be the end of us. We have just two billion years to thank her for our time here. Eternity has a use-by date II But it’ll be up long before that, and in the meantime, I sit on the cold step of the cowshed and watch the world throw its shadow on the moon like a horseblanket; in the meantime the moon reddens in the refraction of all our dawns and sunsets, in a kind of transfigured cosmic smog. An apocalypse that lasts three hours until it’s time to go to bed. III And in the meantime on the floor of my shed, blue planets sing in the hands of children as they once sang in war. Two small worlds forged to cry terribly down like creation unravelling upon one’s foes now make a peaceful clangour on my secular desk. One spins from its orbit and quakes and chips its cerulean shell on the floor of heaven. The tectonics of play. We are loved like this, and this is how it ends. IV I’m arguing a lot with death these days. And last night I found myself in court poised to clinch the case against the absurdity of life. Certainly, this was sleeping and certainly I was dreaming and I’d been losing the thread, but all at once I saw where my argument must run, and I was running it there when my small boy cried and woke me and I went to him and now I’ll never know. V Spring now, and the river has drawn back her bow. The lark ascends from the cd-player, and black ducks sip brown ditchwater in the yard. Everything’s in bud or leaf, last of all the silver poplars and the Osage Orange, trees flaring even now in the backyard of the childhood of my friend, the poet, the poet’s son. The world happens twice. Draw the linen string taut and shoot. VI One lives in paradox. Debussy plays; trucks flounder past like gods who’ve lost control of their machines. In between one makes one’s life up. The sound is the price you pay for the sight that meets you every morning and half of what you paid for the house. The shed puts the perfect sky in her pocket, and possums rut in the roof. Eternity is in rehearsal, and this is its soundtrack. VII Brad mows an acre an hour. A general at ease on his machine, a banker in overalls, he’s rationalised our small republic on one tank of gas. And this now— cutgrass at four o’clock—is how hope smells. Some days I can see no way out: the body of the world in entropy. But today I sit among the ruins of the afternoon, and I cannot see how it can’t all go on forever. VIII Meantime the moon has made herself new again, and there has been rain. The Marulan hills, which had almost forgotten the taste of the word, are spelling green again this afternoon, and there’s water in a lake that’s been a paddock for a decade. Three black cockatoos, and then three more, fly over as I take the southwest road. And into all this panoply of hope, the new moon falls.

Groping back to bed after a piss I part thick curtains, and am startled by The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness. Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky. There’s something laughable about this, The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart (Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below) High and preposterous and separate— Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! O wolves of memory! Immensements! No, One shivers slightly, looking up there. The hardness and the brightness and the plain Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare Is a reminder of the strength and pain Of being young; that it can’t come again, But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Her first child belongs to the crows and his days go circling the yellow-black fields summers and into the falls. He scans the horizon, mouth in a sticky O, like a spirit caged to infinite space. Winged One, she calls,Winged One, come here. Receding, he pulls off his straw hat and waves, showing his tuft of obsidian hair. He’s not coming back just yet. She remembers how crows are small black rivers like stairways leading to rooms that can’t be rooms, only the hallways of space. And then, how she watched him last night in the ruined farmhouse across the road where only a chimney and staircase are left jutting up to the vacant precincts of moonlight. He was stepping so lightly then, who at sixteen forgets his own name, and shits himself like the mindless, fear-mad prey of barn owls. He belonged to the crows and stood for hours on the stairway’s precipice, weaving a dance like crows in flight, until his brother, with rope and fists, carried him struggling down.

Be precise authority is magic. When you think you've got it straight wax wane declination feel the movement under your hand one summer morning as you observe it set then rise that night. Always use a well-sharpened pencil followed by a good eraser. Watch the white emerge.

For Robert Penn Warren Reckless and white as a flashlight beam cast into some dark corner, the moon insists on the deeper blackness surrounding it. Perhaps it wishes to be a woman or a window, cushioning everything, full of itself for the moment, yet frightened, like any egotist. But still the stars patiently insist on their presence, pinholes to nothingness. When else would I walk on such a night in the world? Half answers suggest themselves. The body consumes and wanes, collapses. We get to watch how everyone dies who dies before us, how birds rest. And yet while night solidifies, we can continue our discussion in our effort to open the gift of the world, our hope to find years in this box we tear apart. Birds do not count in our calibration. They crack time randomly, as if it were seeds. With sudden unaccountability they start up and disappear. And yet, in some way all of this is beside the point, for what can we do except continue our conversation, and what would we gain if we disappeared? They tell us that this is so. Do you have any songs from your childhood you still use to sing yourself to sleep? Being, mind, ego: the moon loves itself in cloud shimmers, dancing as if it had pulled a scant nightie off a laundry line to clown with. We can only walk while there is light.

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?

As if the moon could haul through you Its tremor of light and stone, Be cleared of sound. Plough The mind's noise until it's a shine In the purl of south-bending river that bears Itself toward a blacker part of the forest. If you hum, hum through the motes of air, Perhaps your nerves will find at last A tone to which they will succumb. Be still. Be not so heavy-hearted For a moment. All is not a tomb, Blind sarcophagus staring dumb, thwarted Pleasures nailed inside. These fireflies Sweep their tracings on the evening. Weep if you must, but board what falls Away, abdomens flaring— The brief, nomadic intervals.

It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down. It broke like a hen’s egg on the sidewalk. The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my oblivious siblings. A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind. A gush of yolk and then darker. Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala—vinyl seats, the rear- view, headrests and you, your hand through your hair. An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss. Because the earth’s core was cooling, all animals felt the urge to wander. Wash down this whisper of you, the terrible must. Maybe the core wasn’t cooling, but I felt a coolness in my mother. That girl was shining me on. In blue crayon, the bug-bitten siblings printed lyrics on the walls of my room. I wrote the word LAVA on my jeans. It must be the Night Fever, I sang with the 8-track. But the moon had not broken on the sidewalk, the moon was hot, bright as a teakettle whistling outside my door, tied up in sorrow, lost in my song, if you don’t come back . . . and that serious night cooled, settling like sugar on our lawn. I wrote the word SUGAR on my palms. I shall say what inordinate love is. The moon rose itself up on its elbows and shook out its long hair.

Mama said it only existed in storybooks with its soft surface of  bluebells but there it was spinning so close to the earth that it bent every weather vane in Omaha it was prom night and I thought I’d pluck a few trumpets to bring your Grandma so I pulled our red ladder out of  the garage and climbed to the roof I stood up and imagined I was balancing the moon on my head the narrow windows of  Union Station gleamed like ice chips and the thin faces of the clock tower told me it was almost eight I was going to be late picking Nancy up if  I didn’t get a move on so I snipped off the best stems and hurried back down to my Ford I sped through every stop sign on my way to her parents’ house she was waiting with her arms crossed trying not to look upset I think she thought she was going to get stood up so when I popped open the door and told her to get in she couldn’t help smiling a bit she asked what’d taken me so long and I figured I should go ahead and give her the flowers I’d brought her I’d set them back behind the steering wheel to not ruin the surprise I told her she was the princess and I was the knight who rode into the stars so he could flare their notes to her on a blue horn