A few nights ago
Almost-full moon over skidding vapor trail.
A cat on the carpeted stairs.
A street-sign day with no direction.
A few nights ago
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Tag Archives: full moon
First Night in The New House, with Full Moon (#fullmoonsocial2015)
First Night in The New House, with Full Moon
The rising full moon fills in
a small cratered crack in the old window
where a stone or BB years ago must
have dug in before reflecting off its loss
As I sit with my son waiting for his breathing
to level into what I know will be dreams
of the many things he will make and be
the moon continues across the sky
and out of the window’s framing (though the moon
in the window cratered out bright and tiny
remains where it is
how like the past sometimes refuses to move)
#FullMoonSocial // Overcast Full Moon Night, After Snow
Overcast Full Moon Night, After Snow
Rain melts snow then turns
to snow: earth slides soft
then stiffens and stills
and disappears under new snow:
Clouds ride endless wind
always leaving: unseen
and unmoved by the mess
and distance, something
of you and I makes its
own slow circle above
Full Moon Social Anthology 1 [#fullmoonsocial2014]
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…
Suggestion, Just Before Sunrise, Cemetery Hillside [#FullMoonSocial2014]
Suggestion, Just Before Sunrise, Cemetery Hillside
Loblolly pines peel away from the paling sky
looking back on their roots.
Over one’s shoulder the full moon
eclipsed on the western horizon’s
almost an after-thought. As indirect
light rises from the ground below us men come,
constructing the canopy tent for the next
funeral. Ground fog further east glows
red and headlights are no longer
necessary to see where you’re going.
Lunar Occultation
Lunar Occultation
Halfway up the maple, the moon looks
suspended in a mesh of telephone wires.
A few hours ago it blotted a bright blue
planet from the sky—it takes 84 Earth years
for a single year to pass there but the moon
obscures it in ten seconds before its thirteen
rings can split the horizon. On this harvest month
it can dim even the dog star but now it needs my help—
tilting my head in homage I take a few steps
to the right, and the moon is free.
*
Author’s note: The lunar occultation referred to is when the moon passes in front of a planet, in tonight’s case, Uranus. I combined this with the visual experience I had in my front yard this evening. In the long run, I think the version of the poem below, shorter and without the additional planet-specific info, may be the final form this poem takes. Because the specific information about how distance affects time and perception, is very interesting to me, and just kinda cool, I wanted to share the original poem above as well. Due to an unfortunate hit-and-run accident soon after its formation, Uranus is also a strangely tilted planet, thus the reference in the last stanza. Feel free to comment on which version you prefer. Lunar Occultation Halfway up the maple, the moon looks
suspended in a mesh of telephone wires. A few hours ago it blotted a bright blue
planet from the sky—now it needs my help. Tilting my head in homage I take a few steps
to the right, and the moon is free.
Overcast, Full Moon, Rain
Overcast Full Moon Rain
Does the insect know he has a shadow
or what it is cast from
When he moves from lamplight
and the moon cannot remember him
behind the scrim of rain and the shadow drifts
into illegibility does it add its unknowing
to the black page these lines are my shadow
are what the moon remembers
Thunder moon, intermittently overcast
Thunder moon, intermittently overcast
clouds fly before some
thing larger, like shifting
words in a short poem
Six Thirteen Fourteen
Six Thirteen Fourteen (Honey Moon)
The sagging bottom of the sky tears on the mountain
and the gray spilling down ten miles away eventually
obscures the entire ridgeline. I’m out here to see the first
full moon rising on a Friday the thirteenth in June
in a hundred years, and now the horizon is missing.
In the highest branches of the old walnut tree
the leaves are flinging the last rays of sun away
with such chaotic gusto I can’t tell where the wind
is coming from. Closer to the ground the silver maple
holds its leaves out completely level, motionless
as if confirming that, somewhere, here for
the moment anyway, all is calm. The mist arrives
on slender legs ten minutes later, apologetically calm
and thinning the distance: the mountains have moved closer
like how a memory of someone far away suddenly appears
as a thing you want to climb, or a barrier on the path.
And still there is no moon. In bed before midnight
I feel a sudden rush of love for you
as if I myself had just broken through life’s haze,
glowing and spherical, irreducible, reaching without
fail. While the most I see out my window later
is a wedge of pure light through the shifting clouds
I will remember that moon and who I was suddenly,
how love shone off me from light’s source.
Another Full Moon Night, Under Clouds
Another Full Moon Night, Under Clouds
Weightless, local, essence of form but in no form
that keeps, these clouds block my view of the one
thing we can both look at tonight and know we share
the same world. It is not enough to know it’s there—
I must know that I see what you see. But if clouds,
empty of all illusion of form or permanence,
absorb their share of the moon’s glancing light
then maybe this love, shorn of time and setting
and shape, is equally bright and worthy
whether we see the moon or not
Translations from the English 