The flowers reach for their reflections.
A potted plant floats in the air as car
after car runs through it without moving
a petal. A building’s slanting shadow
cuts the road in halves. As I look again
the flowers are not reaching for anything.
A volume of my favorite poet
occupies the left-turn lane.
Car after car have stopped and are waiting;
No light changes. Was all the motion imagined?
Sometimes it’s the other way around,
though most times the winter sun does x off x
by which I mean, you glimpse it baring the soul
of a whisper of empty branches or scrolling a message
across exhausted snow crusting a street corner
and you see reality, suddenly, not in a new way but an old
way in the way the winter sun is old, it’s been burning
so long after all maybe you think not with the heat
it had as a younger sun when everything grew green
beneath its gaze till a hemisphere turned its shoulder one
season and that was it, but sometimes it’s the other way
around, things can be cold and burning at once,
sometimes reality sees you, and it’s blinding.
A thousand years from now, the distance between last night
and tonight will be infinite. Unreachable, like the star
you pretend to hold at the end of the line I never wrote.
The last night of a waning moon is this night’s memory
cradling in its thin hand the entire darkness
of what we almost cannot see and so pretend
is not there even as what never happened
pulls us back like moonlight through winter trees.
Stay awake to watch. You have only twenty five thousand seconds
to read this before you wake up remembering that
I never wrote it, brimming with loss and a poem that
started with How does the waning moon still rise?
At the walnut tree’s highest reach
the day’s breeze sets twigs and thin branches
tense like frantic lost messages, last waves goodbye
but the slur slows through the random knots
and twists of the limb structure and’s spread asunder
further in by the outward-reaching limbs and widening
resolve of main branches to the absolute breaking
of leftover negative space: down where I am, humming
a tune I heard my beloved sing and will not forget,
just my voice in the quiet, here at the trunk where all is still.
Plows pound the shoreline of the storm.
When their wave has passed, the shovels
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!
I left everything in a hotel room on my way to another
An eight year old boy rode his new bike with no training wheels
On the street I caught a blue pouch thrown by a stranger
I knew by how it settled into my palm it was a string of rosary beads
A butterfly fighting the gentle morning breeze on the hill again
and again to land on a dead squirrel and feed
Two early fireflies high in the ash tree’s night canopy
where earlier in the day hundreds of white flowers
Floated down, tiny parachutes onto new grass
The moon sparking off a tin roof like a match
My wife lay her head on my chest to listen to my heart
as I awoke from a dream of laughing
12.
Midnight. In a corner of a room
a few days away, a half century crouches.
In the dark the corners of the years round up
certainty into the smooth black mast
against which direction flaps without words,
a trunk removed from its roots.
In the morning it is the maple and its shadow
unwinding along riverways of air and light.
The maple is old but the leaves always young,
the hours of the year, the half million
minutes through which we extend and end,
define the canopy of entirety itself by the shape
of what we miss. We shed time but are shaped by it;
wine on a quiet night, before crickets.
In the night the unseen stretches out.
Grass growing just before dawn.
I think I see the moon in my window
but it is the ceiling lamp’s reflection.
At lights out, the windowframe relaxes.
We spread downhill, and into the air a giant
centimeter. The real moon shakes hands
with every cloud. Even without eyes it
does not miss a single one. When morning
light crawls down from the treetops
and you are out with the dogs the grass
cannot believe how much you have grown.
Nothing gets done by paying attention.
11.
Upstairs in my old house I find a bat
sleeping off a warm May morning
I usher the cats from the room
open the windows and let him rest
Toward dusk I come back his eyes are open
so I gather him up in a pitcher and in slow
motion pour him into the cooling air
Translations from the English 