Letter from Insomnia

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Mr Okaji always comes through for the #fullmoonsocial. Thanks Robert! Great poem.

robert okaji's avatarO at the Edges

image

Posting this in response to Jeff Schwaner’s Full Moon Social. No time to write a new one, so I hope this oldie will do.

Letter from Insomnia

Accepting Li Po’s tragedy,
apocryphal or not,

we embrace her imperfect
reflection
rippling in the breeze,

but manage to surface.

I once thought I would name a child Luna
and she would glow at night

and like Hendrix, kiss the sky.
But that was whimsy

and only candles light this room
at this hour
on this particular day
in this year of the snake.

And what fool would reach for a stone orbiting at
1,023 meters per second?

There are clouds to consider, the stars
and the scattering rain

and of course wine
and the possibilities within each glass
and the drops therein.
We must discuss these matters

under her gaze, where smallness gathers.

This originally appeared in Middle Gray in October…

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To a Reader of a Dream

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To a Reader of a Dream

The unfocused object

makes the moonlight beautiful. It is not the other way.
I edge along the side of the dream like a raccoon

along the shadow of a house. To anyone passing
by or peering from a darkened window

I will look not unlike some masked fulfillment,
but then you would have to explain what you were

doing in my dream.

Ghosts

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Ghosts

A week in the new house and we’re hearing and seeing things.
Black walnut trees scatter the light. Yellow leaves falling early

and long, through August and September. A few nights ago
someone banging around downstairs woke me up.

At my desk I hear a heavy foot take two strides in the room above
then stop. The room is as empty as a rationale.

One of my dogs is going to die. Almost a reminder of himself.
Behind the house I’m walking beside him in the cooling world

when a walnut pod, size of a baseball, smacks off the eave, bounces
and resounds on the porch’s tin roof. So there they are, my ghosts,

and so many left to fall, real despite what I believe or don’t, reminders,
inconsequential and eventually crumbling within softening husks

but for the moment so hard you’d have to drive a pickup truck
over them to hear a few of them crack open the inedible fruit.

Super Moon Lunar Eclipse Extra Special Full Moon Social, Already! #fullmoonsocial

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So apparently it is like not only a massive super moon this weekend, but also a great lunar eclipse starting around 9pm ET here in the Blue Ridge. What better time than this full moon to launch another #fullmoonsocial event on WordPress and Twitter? The eclipse lasts for three hours or so at a pretty optimal time for many of us, though I am looking at a forecast for overcast skies here in VA Sunday night.

We know that for as long as people have been writing poetry, they have written about the moon. Chinese poets made an art form of this during the T’ang and Sung dynasties that in many ways has yet to be rivaled. Viewing the full moon in September is a ritual to take time to think about friends and loved ones we are separated from by distance, even to think of those special to us we have not yet met.

So during the time the moon is up in your neck of the world–I’m talking to you, Esther! and Leonard! and Emily! and Robert! and C! and M! and Ron! and GG! and Sister M! among others!–take the time to write a poem for someone who may not know you are thinking of them, or may know and be thinking of you, or even for someone you haven’t met yet but who is looking at that same moon, and tag it #fullmoonsocial on wordpress and/or Twitter and/or Instagram. I’ll try and re-blog and re-tweet as I see them.

I’ll just close this invitation with one of my favorite moon poems, by the Japanese poet Masahide, who wrote a poem that can be roughly translated as:

Barn’s burnt down. Now 
I can see the moon better.

See you under the moon!

Vellichor

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books

Vellichor

Before rain. Clouds dozens of thoughts away gather
in the corner of your vision, surreptitious as Bigfoot,

as growing up. Every love is an act of defenestration,
like words eye-diving off the page into the casual reader’s

blink of sudden sonder. Hiraeth! when the bookstore closes
something reaches out from you for the story you haven’t held

but would have fit perfectly on your heart’s shelf. Then a dozen
thoughts pass and the petrichor rises from the earth to meet

the first drops of rain, sliding down invisible vines of physics
which determine where they’ll land, but not how you’ll smile.

Fortune

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How dark is dark? How wise is wise? --from a fortune cookie 9/18/15

Fortune

How wise is wise? A pretense on paper, a future memory
turned inside out, the container for who we actually

were when it mattered. Wisdom back then was swans
circling and your skin’s glow reinventing morning.

Barely visible in the dark was a fortune

we could spend before dawn. In the gray plague
of this decade, where we fear our own hearts

have slowed to the speed of anachronism
love is thrust upon me like a check at a buffet.

I will pay for everybody and yes I want a copy.

The moon tonight is a fortune cookie on a black plastic tray.
How dark is dark? Have you read in the predawn light the same fortune?

September Bonfire

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September Bonfire

bonfire

In the bonfire I see something that would eat even death.
So death must not be made of air after all.

I see summer’s bones smoldering long after the flame.
The seasons curled like scrolls of verse around each other collapse.

We have one of these every month, the landowner tells me.
Just from the stuff that falls away.

The one who stands in darkness while the other watches the sun set
will be walking in the morning sun while the other kicks off a fitful dream.

At a certain point it will make sense to gather fallen branches.
To dream wide awake of a motion that will eat even death.