Two pathetic lines about the moon…(ii)
As the wine sea ebbs
Moon like a glass etching rises
As the wine sea ebbs
Moon like a glass etching rises
For those of my Loyal Readers in the Staunton area who did not make the book launch a few weeks back, I’ll be joining three other poets — Caroline Brae, Patsy Asuncion, and Leona Sevick — for a reading at the Ox-Eye Vineyards tasting room on Middlebrook Avenue, right downtown.
I’ll have copies of Wind Intervals as well as a few other things. The Ancients would love this setting, as drinking wine during the reading is heartily encouraged! To honor those old poets I’ll probably be reading from the Mei Yao-ch’en sequence Moonlight & Shadow, as well as from Wind Intervals. And maybe a few others.
As always before readings, I throw out the question to All of You. Anything you’d like me to read from the bulky mass of thin wonders that inhabit this place? Right now I’m considering “Stillness in a Low Time During the Rainiest Month of May in Half a Century” and maybe “Poem for the Back Cover of a Book” and “What We Want” but I’m still in the half-panicky-open-to-anything stage of preparation…
This is how the month tasted, too. Full and lush on the front,
a vacation rental that is not too big or expensive but rich.
On the back, like the sound of surf slipping through the sand,
the taste of something going away, complexity escaping completion, dry on the tongue.
The bottle-less nights dead-man’s-float on the drifting water
the moon’s cup fills with early January
until it is sideways with days but nothing spills out
these brown maple leaves hanging on by mistake
like old hands brush against me
I know them but they do not recognize me
but still they reach out: old moon keep your drink
I do not wish to embrace you