Someone tell the two Canada geese
flying up the street at quarter past nine
this November evening they are heading
to West Virginia
Mountains bow low when the day stands up.
Immediately the sun is at our house
preparing to knock – the maple spreads its arms.
Later, we wake among stilled stars and golden silence.
Watching the moon
through a hole
in an ash leaf
*
What a caterpillar
didn’t eat frames a
thousand years
*
This poem is a leaf
where what’s missing
reveals the other side and
what’s left behind is
bound to fall
Moon
Stone in the sky
tumbles through centuries
of clouds smoothing out
absence with its presence
Maple
Just past their peak, wind-lifted
and let go like a child flung off a swing
higher than they have ever been
Meanwhile on the ridge line the trees
link arms and begin the walk home
Now that it is done I should know who I am
and why I did it and who I did it for now
that it is arrived the end should be a secret
passage back to the beginning and this
unfinished space a private garden at world’s
end and the buried seeds break anew now that
destruction’s heat has called them open and when
things begin that are unexpected we should have
expected them back here at the beginning knowing
everything that follows but because nothing
follows the end I should know I’m not there now
that it is done and where are you now that
It is done you should know who you are
Deer have ventured out through thinning trees
into thickening traffic. Men in trucks gentle them
to the breakdown lane with shovels. The last leaf’s
twisting stem is the voice of the deer in November.
With a moon not yet full behind a sky not yet clear
a glowing handprint floats over the house
holds emptiness like a drifting welcome
closed to nothing always open to you
Winter begins in the stones. In a dream the sky house
gets closer as if it is trying to hear a secret or tell me one
but when I can read its lips I see it is just pretending.
In the car: stones from a trip to the beach.
A thousand miles from where we found them
for months they have rested in a drink holder
with no discernible nature acting on them,
no car tides or car gulls have hampered their stillness.
Now when we pick them up on a drive we marvel
at how cold they are on this mild first day of November.
You can press them to your hand, your neck, your cheek
and they stay cold. They are telling me a secret
without moving their lips or pretending to tell me anything.
They are coming closer without moving, like snow clouds.
In a space under trees I can hear the wind that is not here
like a can kicked across the street by a boy still coming
or as if the act of the boy shaping his mouth to shout
made a sound before the sound of the shout
What is the word that I hear before the trees
above me shake and give the wind a momentary word
What is the sound of a loosening of leaves
like forgetting hands just before they drop
to our sides? The interval of apprehension.
The time we are alive. The boy stepping up the curb.
The idea was simple–let’s all gaze at the moon together, wherever we are, and share our words and images. Let’s have a full moon social event that the Ancients would understand and appreciate.
On October 8, 2014 WordPress and Twitter sparkled with poems, prose fragments, and photos from an assortment of creative folk using the hashtag #fullmoonsocial2014. It was a fun night to moon-gaze — and to refresh our searches on that tag to see what new poem or photo had popped up.
As much as I could, and with the permission of the authors, I have gathered this work into a humble anthology, available in PDF format. While designed like a traditional book, and without the website-inspired underlining, the websites or Twitter handles of each contributors are live links which will take you directly to their sites to find out more about the author and her/his work. The Contents pages are likewise linked to the book as well.
Please feel free to download it here, as a keepsake and a thank-you from me for joining in, to write, contribute, and to read. Any typos or other issues are mine, and please do not hesitate in letting me know if some adjustment needs to be made.
Likewise, if you’re an author or artist or photographer who contributed to the Full Moon Social but you don’t see your work here, let me know and I’ll add it in.
And if anyone’s interested in doing it again…
Translations from the English 