The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood

A half moon low in the south: why so low? I don't think I've ever understood quite why the moon wanders so far from the ecliptic. Or does it? Maybe I'm just not minding the swings of the ecliptic. But sometimes the moon is high, way high, and sometimes low. As tonight. Mid-August, not particularly close to a solstice; it seems like the moon should be riding a middle way, not tangled in the trees of the flats south of Burnside. I'll have to look it up. But not now.

Now: that rounded chip caught in the trees, ivory-yellow. Diana. Σελήνη. Me he quedado mirando a la luna, a través de las finas acacias. And yet.

Feeling age pull at me, feeling the waste of my strength. I'm exercising a little again, going for little walks. Still feeling fragile, easily irritated, easily tired. What troubles me most, of course, is not having a lingering illness: it's discovering that the reason I haven't had a lingering illness before now is not that I'm a special person, who just doesn't put up with that sort of thing: it's that up till now I've had a nice run of dumb luck. in point of fact I'm just a regular person like other regular people. 

In Searoad an Important Man from Salem comes to a little Oregon beach town and takes a room at a hotel that has been mostly booked up by -- according to the side of their bus -- "The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood: A Christian Community." He views them benevolently, but as the weekend progresses and people in town repeatedly assume he's one of them ("Your party is on the patio, sir") he gets less and less happy about them. Le Guin didn't go in for humor much, but it's deftly done.

Well. Let's call it a night, Dale. Here's hoping for another run of luck, eh?

Sleeping With The Moon

Gathering the threads of what I am 
and amen't going to do
for the rest of rolling eterne, 
or twenty years, or two:

I shall eat vegetables twice a day,
thread fingers through your hair,
wash the dishes once a week,
and bring myself to despair.

I shall run sometimes and lift up weights
and wander out under the sky,
I shall read the books that prove me wrong,
and ready myself to die.

The sandpipers run in and out with the wave
the monk runs in and out with the breath:

I rise with the sun and examine my hands,
and sleep with the moon a-purr on my chest.

Morning Walk

A glorious walk this morning, the full moon lighting a sheath of cloud as it fell westwards, Venus rising huge and strangely yellow in the east, and Jupiter due south. I had to stop and stare at Venus a while. There must have been a haze eastwards: Venus is usually pure brilliant white, tending to blue, if anything; but she was as yellow as Jupiter this morning. The whole sky was a patchwork of cloud and clear, and the moon shifted the shades of everything, as she will: it took me a long time to get fully oriented. I knew nothing but Venus could be so bright as that fabulous orb in the southeast, and anyway I could already see Jupiter, high up on the ecliptic, but I wondered for a while if it was some sky-ship, or a mirage, or something. Or possibly I had walked away and slid unbeknownst into another sky, with new planets. I imagine sometimes the giddiness of seeing the southern stars for the first time: the most fundamental of disorientations. I hope I do see them, someday, and my world will yaw like a little boat on the sea. 

Walking home, northwards now, I saw that Vega was already well up over the horizon. She keeps appearing, these days, at odd times: when I was younger I only saw her in the summertime, but this year I was seeing her late into the Fall in the early evening, and now I glimpse her in the morning. Maybe I only looked for her in the summer, before. She did not signify so much in those days. Now I'm always looking for a sign that the blessing has left me. But the blessing never does: I don't understand it.

One special instance: I was on the far side of the West Hills, in the late Fall, getting my gear out the car, and one small pool of sky opened in the cloud cover, and there was Vega, just opening her wings to light on the Coast Range. Such things don't bear much handling, of course, but you can't ignore them either.

Invincible Summer

You can still see Vega
over the garage roof,
even in early December,

when the Winter King
is laboring up the eastern sky,
leaning on his stick,

and cursing the housetops;
and though Orion shakes
his shaggy wondering head,

after his long summer blindness.
She's still there, and the writ of her blessing still runs.
And beyond, beyond,

is the white lob of the Moon,
drawing kiltered squares
through all the blanched windows of the world:

here and across the mountains,
where the road outruns its colors,
and a pale face is turned to the pale sky.

Interlude: The Moon And Venus

How fast it can all crumble! And I realize there was never much there, after all. But I'm lost on a bare plateau, in the gray wind, trying to assemble myself and failing. But I can't go on putting off the reckoning. This is silly: it's always been silly. I have the advantage now, anyway, of being able to put aside the pretense that I'm in control or know what I'm doing. That, at least, is one hag that's no longer riding.

First of all I'm going to need to get some sleep, some real sleep. For weeks now I've been waking after four or five hours, and walking my mind in circles about whatever most frets me at the moment. I need to stop that somehow. Everything collapses, without sleep: ordinary intelligence and prudence disappear, and what remains is a paper thing, like a huge wasp's nest, dropping shreds of itself as it stumbles from wanting to fearing and back again. I shamble on, against the gray wind or with it, but I might as well be still. There is no chance, none whatever, of arriving anywhere I want to be, by this means.

Eight fingers and two thumbs: adding carefully, I come up with ten. That still seems to work. And the person I was before has left inscriptions. Not all of them legible, but I do have some guidance. At this point one is supposed to call upon gods or friends for help, I suppose: but I've had enough of the agendas of others. I'll work this out for myself. So a nice deep breath, here. Not too much longer, now. This is an inherently unstable state: it won't last.

And last night the slender Moon and Venus were a blessed relief: still there, still beautiful, lingering after sunset in the West. I had almost thought the sky would be blank, a vapid darkening screen. But it wasn't. It never is. We will do fine.

Apparent Motion

And embarrassing how often I find I have driven entirely off the rails, no longer moving at all, my eyes still flicking to some ancient jerking cartoon song, and I, I, alone and as lost as ever. I never knew what I was doing. How the sky wheels overhead! a waxing crescent moon setting, meaning it has been haunting the sky unseen all day. I have heard people, grown human beings with real jobs, wondering where the moon has gone that they glimpsed in the west at evening. They think because it's new it should be rising, I guess. I don't even have the heart to tell them.

The earth, the earth is round like a ball, or like a shoulder, or like a smoothed pebble, and as I turn it -- thus -- the moon (the which we figure as this fingertip of chalk) appeareth to rise and set. And so the sun too appeareth to rise and set, but all this is the spinning of this lovely blue and white roundness, and all the things that show shining in the west, all of them, are dropping from our sight. 

The moon sure seems a little slower than the others: because it really is travelling, right around us, going to the East: not so fast as we are spinning, not near so fast, but fast enough -- it keeps up enough -- to seem to lag behind the stars, a handsbreadth maybe per night. It is not lagging; rather, it is falling behind our spin more slowly than the stars, if you like to look at it that way. If you like to look at it at all. Do you like to look at it? Do you like to imagine that it's real? Do that, sometimes: because it is real. 

I too am real, a real animal, even if I am an untracked train car, a sometime wreck. My chest rises and falls some twelve times a minute, and my heart beats some five times per breath, falling behind, maybe, like the moon against the stars, or else -- you can always lay the string end to end the other way -- catching up with the unmoving flesh. And my eyes blink. You can tell I'm alive, no matter how still I hold myself: how the blood kicks with each squeeze of the heart! And that's not even to mention all the gurgling and fermenting in my midsection, more the work of my resident bacteria than of mine, sure, but still ordered and marshalled and delimited by my digestive tract -- yards and yards of smooth muscle, doing its work with no more than a casual nod to the voluntary motor system in passing. 

Now -- to the purpose of our rather speech -- supposing other people to be fixed -- they are not, I know, but suppose -- then my heart might be said to advance a handsbreadth, every day, though it appears to lag. So if you see it shining in the west, don't look for it later on at night. It will have dropped from your sight: it has been in the sky all day, but you've been too blind, my dear, too blind to see it. It is only an ocean of potassium and sodium, after all, washing against calcium shores. How I love you, and miss you! 

So I set one wheel after another onto the rails, heaving her up, under the stars. No, no, no moon tonight! You haven't listened to a word I've said, have you?

Rally and heave, heave O! we sing. Round and round and round she goes, back on the track and away she rolls!

New Moon

You, love, you, all

countenanced in the white circumference,

and within

the earthshine

between the horns, the lemmas of Dis:

you, I love you still, you know. You,

who you said would remember, are forgetting:

I, whom you said would forget, remember. So it is,

So it goes on, like a net dragging the dewy hillside:

memory is neither clean nor dry. Only in poems

do you get to say “I told you so.”

Silk ears swivel and twitch,

muzzles lift, eyes widen,

lips lift and show the needle fangs.

Love is still alive and feral,

it still roams under the new moon,

trotting on ancient cinder paths:

and kindness, still there, whines

like a young dog longing for a walk.

I told you so. I know a bit about love:

I've served in this house a long time,

taking abuse and kindness as it comes.

The crescent silvers the scars,

The new blood holds the old blood in its arms,

and the thump of a dish on the kitchen floor

gets even an old dog to his feet.

Ant by Moonlight

Monstrous that the moon should rise tonight,
bulge-headed, throwing

shadows without scale or increment:
in its light that a benighted traveler ant

should cross pools of gleaming motor oil,
his legs ticking

in an abominable
hail of photons –

even worse. What tyrant god
allows this home-wrecking,

this scouring floodlight, this bleaching breach
of peace? The Queen of Night is nailed up

by a few faint lyrical stars, helpless,
while the bloat of the moon

drifts through her kingdom:
day-creatures stutter on their shadows,

their eye-buds breathe in phosphor,
they taste

with their feet
the poisoned ground.

Salt Water

My sentence is not to go down to the sea,
which is only for pure of heart;
I wander where the asphalt is bitten away
by winter rains on the clifftop.

The moon is a mottled pearl afloat
in wash of milk: the long fluttering manes
of the white horses wade ashore
in wavering skirmish lines. An endless assault.

The generals fall off
the horsebacks and disappear -- it's only water,
after all. The seals' haul-out is empty,
and no whales swim.

I count them off on my fingers, each wave,
but the total never comes out right. I think
they must be right, that I embezzled
the salt water entrusted to me:

but what I spent it on
I could not tell you now.

Tidework

Every touch creates a tidemark.
Behind it, the sounding sea, the rush
and swell of blood in capillaries
of ears or throat; air breaking on the beach
of your chest, the fading surf of shame,
the receding tide of insult, and eventually,
the full moon at the still pivot, high tide,
my hands coming to rest, a momentary sense
of plenitude. It will not stay. I did not make it.

Ten thousand advertisements say
they want a walk on the beach and a glass
of some wine better than they knew at home.

Is it disrespect to say I don't believe it?
to say the wind is skating disregarded feathers
on wide and empty sand-shelves even now?

I don't know much, but the moon does come
to sit with me on cloudy evenings, and he brings
a gallon of home-brewed yarrow beer to split.
He tells me all about how people hide from him,
How he rises over bunchgrass and glittering silica
where nothing but cellophane wrappers go for walks.

And a gruff tenderness comes into his pocked face
when he speaks of low tide, of wincing things exposed
that have no recourse, no defense against the sun.
He rises, snaps his weed-pouch shut, and sighs.
It's back to work for him, and for me, it's sheets to wash,
bottles of lavender oil and cloudlight to refill.

The Moon at Anchor

If I sewed two little connected flannel bags, each the size of the circle I can make with my thumb and forefinger (the 'O' of the “OK” gesture), and filled them with steel shot or small ball bearings, that might work. Little velcro-shut bags. I want something small and heavy, that will sit right on top of the eyes to block the light, but will stay put, so that I can do supine neck and shoulder work, and even scalp and TMJ work, without having to fuss with it. I have a client now who simply pulls the covers right over her head when I turn her over onto her back. But of course I have to pull them back down when I do what I usually save for last, the serious neck & shoulder & scalp & face work, and she grimaces a little, involuntarily, when I do. Every thing I've seen so far is a little light, or not properly washable, or drapes over the forehead and temples.

I could empty the balls into a dish, wipe them with bleach, and wash the little bags with the sheets. Or if a regular wanted one of their own they could just keep one, that would be easy. The metal balls would start cold on cold days, though. I'd have to smuggle the eye pillow onto a corner of the table warmer, so it would be nice and warmed up before I turned my client over.

---

I'm at the door, with all my kit packed up. Her daughter loms onto her, for a hug, and I ruffle the girl's hair. She flashes a smile at me. She likes me. I didn't give her away when first I spotted her, years ago, creeping down to get a glimpse of her Mom getting a massage, when she was supposed to be in bed. We have been secret sharers, ever since. “Now let me give Dale a hug before he goes,” laughs her Mom. The girl yields the floor with dignity, like a veteran senator. A warm terrycloth hug, and I'm out the door, into a cold night with flying clouds and the moon riding restlessly at its sea-anchor over the housetops. This part of my life, anyway, is right. I've found my work.

How much Time the Moon Loses, and what Math is for

The moon is higher, setting later, this morning. She loses time, of course. Every day she rises and sets later -- I don't remember how much, exactly: 45 minutes? Hang on a sec, I'll work it out.

I forget, sometimes, that the sky is not so legible to everyone, that many people don't even have clear in their minds the path of the zodiac -- difficult though it is for me to understand. It's the same path the sun and the moon walk, higher in summer, lower in winter: how can you live in the world, day after day, and not realize that the the sun and the moon appear only in a certain swath of the sky?

I know that learning the names and appearance of the planets is something only a few of us do -- and that only a few of us learn the patterns of the stars well enough to say certainly, that has to be a planet, it can't be a star, because there is no star there! -- but everyone knows the sun and moon. Except, apparently, they don't. It seems that at every full moon, I hear someone marveling over the coincidence that this moon happened to be rising right around sunset! or setting right around sunrise!

Um, yes. That's what a full moon is, it's the moon standing (vis a vis us) opposite to the sun. It's not a rare coincidence. It's been happening, every 28-and-some days, since our species was sniffing about on all fours.

Anyway, since the moon has to slip back to the same spot in the sky in roughly 28 days, she's got to slip 28 times through the 24 hour clock of the sky, meaning she has to slip about 24 28ths of an hour each time. 24/28 = x/60 -- let's say 51 minutes? Close enough.

This is what math is for. So you don't have to be helpless and look it up, if you don't remember something like how much the moon slips every night. It's not rocket science; it's simple arithmetic. They taught you this in third grade so that you wouldn't have to take anyone's word for it: you can do it yourself.

Don't let anyone push you around: keep your math skills up to snuff. Work little problems like this every day, take the extra couple minutes and satisfy yourself that you're right. It's a magnificently empowering feeling. And you can surprise and amaze your friends by telling them exactly when they're going to see the moon rise tomorrow night. This stuff works. It's real. You can bet your life on it, in fact, we all do, every day, because this the way the engineers who built your cars and roads and bridges figured out how much they could take. Simple physics, simple arithmetic, for the most part.

It's our birthright, as human beings: it's our inheritance. It maddens me when people turn away from math and science as disempowering. This is empowerment. It's when you don't know your math and science that people can lead you around by the nose and hoodwink you. You don't like your math teacher? He's a condescending sexist oaf with the aesthetic sensitivities of a roundworm? Fine. Hate him. But take what he has on offer anyway, because this, this is genuine power, this is the real stuff. This is one of the fundamental ways you get a grip on the world.

Don't give it up because you're sensitive aesthetic person. So am I. I'm a poet and a massage therapist, for God's sake, the very model of a pansy aesthete, and you'll take my math away when you pry it out of my cold dead brain.

Aubade

Black ice makes a pattern on the pavement
of negric circles reaching out to circles:
tatters of white frost hold them isolate.

As I come up over the rise an alien sphere
glides into view, startling the treetops:
an incongruous face

floating in the fresh untroubled blue;
an unshaven drunk on a dewy park bench,
bringing a reek of taverns into the day.

O, thou moon of misdemeanors,
outliving truth and trust,
why here, why now?

The real poets are all asleep,
and I only have escaped to see you
wandering along the West Hills

full of drunken song and imprecations,
ready to stumble into the river with Li Po,
oh! Drowning in your cleverness.

You will have set
by the time the real poets wake,
with their memories

of the chaste and solemn orb
that shot the shores of night with silver,
and glimmered and gleamed on the river.

And no one will ever believe me,
that I saw you shrieking here at dawn
with a musk of hops and malt around you.

The Creatures as Buddha Found Them

We are the creatures
as Buddha found them:
unshaking, unshoken,
unwaking, unwoken.

We are the sleepers
as Ahriman bound them:
unleaking, unloken,
unspeaking, unspoken.

---

Deb Scott's 17th stone for A River of Stones

Yesterday evening I rode my bike under a night sky still blue, with the moon circled in a rusty ring, and a long haunted shore of white cloud to the east, above Mt Tabor. Deb Scott, across the river in the West Hills, made a memorable stone of it. At the Powell's on Hawthorne Sage read from her new book and fielded questions with wonderful grace -- the more wonderful and endearing, now that I know her well enough to be able to see how nervous being at the podium makes her. I saw Tom Mattox and Shanna Germain there, but was too shy to introduce myself to them. Mary Marsh delighted and confounded me by hugging me and saying she loved my poems. Portland seemed like a magical place, last night. Winter meant nothing: we could have lit a campfire on Hawthorne Boulevard and roasted marshmallows over it, in perfect comfort, and sung songs all night until the moon went to rest beyond Deb's house.

Now it's morning, and we're soon to take ship. More on that anon. Go gently, sleepers.

Daughter

A couple days ago a troubled aged moon rode in the pools left by the cloud-wrack, and I wrote an American Sentence: “the moon's thin arms cling to the ghost-gray smear of her vanishing father.”

If you're marinated in Coleridge, as I am, you'll know the antecedents: his epigraph to the Dejection ode, from “the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens” --

Late, late yestre'en I saw the new moon
With the old moon in her arms,
And I fear, I fear, my maister dear
We shall have a deadly storm.

Which inspired in their turn possibly the most brilliant lines Coleridge ever wrote:

For Lo! The new moon winter-bright
And overspread with phantom light --
With swimming phantom light o'erspread
But rimmed and circled by a silver thread --
I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast,
And O that even now the gust were swelling
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast . . .

Well, well, you'll never be Coleridge, Dale; never mind; we're just doodling here. Your lines will do for a pale 21st Century “poem.”

It just happened to be an American Sentence. As you may recall, I don't think the American Sentence makes much sense as a verse form. English verse is a stress-counting creature, not a syllable-counting one. But I recollected that I could make it a “haiku,” as we disastrously miscall that other unsuitable-to-English form, that 5-7-5 thing. So I tried it out.

The Moon's thin arms cling
to the ghost-gray smear of her
vanishing father.

Ugh. Ending a line with “of her”? No thank you. And the feminine near-rhyme of “of her” with “father” is icky, if your attention is drawn to it like that. In fact, maybe that near-rhyme is a problem anyway. Hmm.

Well, leaving aside how to chop this thing into lines, if at all, I turned to the problem of titling it. “Waning crescent?” There's a nice inbuilt semantic contradiction there: “crescent,” etymologically, means “growing.” This moon of course was not growing, it was dying -- the last of the old moon, not a new moon yet. And then I realized that this was critical to how I saw this Moon. Not everyone observes the distinction I do -- or even knows it exists -- between the last edge of the old moon and the first edge of the new moon. The poem makes no sense if you think it's a new moon. Maybe it should go like this, and then the problems of lineation and title might both solved:

Old Moon

Waning crescent: the moon's thin arms cling
to the ghost-gray smear of her vanishing father.

And so, it becomes a poem of four-beat lines, and as Nicholson Baker's Anthologist insists, all English poetry is really in four-beat lines. Good enough. For now. But I still think that internal near-rhyme is a problem.

Moonrise

She rose pale and spotted with nipples and eyes,
moored by her hands to the gate of lies,
she stood wordless in the rocking boat
what she could not say was stuck in her throat.

He reached bloody hands to the sun and gripped
and squeezed the ball till it spurted and dripped,
and silver lights dribbled on the bay:
all of her strength was drabbled away.

“All this is mine, the sun and the sin,
breast and feather and beak and skin:
all this is mine, mine to collect
mine to eat up, mine to infect,”

-- he boasted, and yet could not cross the water
and it came suddenly to the Stream's daughter
that for all of it, he was afraid of her,
afraid of the water, afraid of the stir

and fret of the knotting waves;
afraid of the tide that sucks into caves,
afraid of the mouths that fasten by night
over the eyes and the candlelight.

Unseen in the darkness that spun
out of the wounded, withering sun
a sparrow flickered against the gate,
and the sparrow said to her only, “wait.”

His feet clutched the slimy rock,
he waded forward and the shock
of cold water hurt his mind;
cold water unconfined

ate into his ankles and knees;
his calves and thighs began to freeze.
I only wanted to love you, he said
and from out of his trembling head

came rivers of crawling and biting things
twitching with mandibles and stings;
they poured like tears from his nose and eyes,
terrified by the water's rise.

Blinded and emptied he sank
and the water boiled for a time and stank
and still the sparrow at the gate
whispered only, “Wait. Wait.”

The water grew still and then
suddenly it moved again:
lights were flickering there below
fish made of sundrops began to glow

and swirled into a net of light:
They rose together, silver bright,
and the sparrow said “soon,”
and soon up rose the glimmering moon.

Oh my darling, come to shore,
clothe yourself, and fear no more,
The night is marked now by the sacred rune
of the fishy, silver, glimmering moon.

Four Stations: Sun and Moon

Then, the lighted doorway: new leaves glimmering;
the waxing moon
losing her footing on turbulent clouds.
Softness of breast under sweater. Goodbye:
always goodbye.

---

Now morning, half light, hunched shoulders,
sorting through versions of the day, deciding
on the next press release, my own handler.
What the President meant to say --
What the President was trying to convey --
Hush. No one is listening.

---

This evening
I will drive through a concrete tunnel and up a hill
to where the sunset country gleams,
too bright to look at. Over the West Hills,
into the land of promise. No one can see:
The traffic will slow
and grope. An orange and violet diffusion,
the sky wearing garish lipstick, the road paint
glitttering. Sun
will hold my head in the vice of her hands:
an unwelcome aunt determined on a kiss.

---

Listen. This is all I have.
Don't think that there's more concealed,
better to come, delights yet
undisclosed. I love you like
a mother mouse loves the squirming skin
jellybeans of her litter;
I love you like a stag in rut
loves any doe that crosses his path.
I love you like a wolf loves
his loping packmates,
like a swan loves the glide of his wife,
like the moon loves the clouds that stumble her.

The Lobster in August


As I ride up tree-lined 53rd, a single leaf falls from a tree. I glance up. Still green. Just trying it on.

---

I haven't dared to meditate for weeks. Not now, now while I'm negotiating a new contract with the world.

---

(Silly way of putting it. The world doesn't make contracts and doesn't honor them.)

---

Struggling to think my way through to a new way of being. Which is not very smart. You don't think your way to a new way of being. Act your way, maybe. Meditate your way. Suffer your way. But thinking doesn't do much. Still, it seems always to be a part of it. Maybe it's just a formality that needs to be gone through. A new way of being has to be presented to the cerebral cortex. Like being presented to a Hanoverian monarch: it's done with much pomp and ceremony, but it's the hasty whispered conversation with the prime minister that's going to actually get something done. So I have to think my way through, try to keep my sword from getting awkwardly stuck between my legs, remember not to turn my back on the king.

---

Nerval, leading his lobster on a blue ribbon through the Paris gardens. You want to be careful of lobsters, said Holmes's friend: they have spent too long under the sea. (Read Richard Holmes' Footsteps, if you ever get the chance. It's a book that propels you outwards, in an unguessable direction. Like one of those whirly things in the park, you make it spin faster and faster and faster and finally you can't hang on any more and go flying off -- in some direction: you can't tell in which, until you're tumbling on the grass.)

---

I wonder what the Chinese for "lobster" is. The French is "homard," which sounds to me as if it ought to mean "something that likes to try out being a man."

---

Bluegreen. The Chinese have a single word, qing, that covers the whole color field we divide so sharply into blue and green. Useful for going under the sea with the lobsters, where everything is some shade of blue or green.

---

Suppose you do crawl up out of the ocean, like the lobster on the tarot card: does that make you a hero or a monster? Out here in the thin cold air, the dizzying open space, where possibility seems so much wider, but where the currents only kiss you, never push you? "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea."

---

Eliot didn't write very much good poetry. Enough to fill a nice chapbook, maybe. Prufrock, some of The Waste Land, the Four Quartets. The rest, as Udge observed, is really not worth reading. Except maybe the cat poems.

---

But. "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea": he was thinking of Nerval, perhaps. "A pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Lobsters again. They're everywhere, if you start to look.

My lover comes home tonight from far away
from fogs where sunlight glints on gray
from the thump and purl of insisting waves.

She won't still love me the voices say
the shrouded moon will have drawn her to play
with men far older and younger, who pray

sweetly in her own tongue, who pay
extravagant compliments and array
her in opals and pearls and jade.

My lover comes home tonight from far away;
She won't still love me the voices say.

Luna

Unswift, but curving to the hand
(like the sound of a bell, returning to the wrist)
a longed-for voice, turning up or down
at the end of a phrase, a frieze
of stick figures crowding all one way,
glyphs marching lemming-like to cliffs
and dropping, one by one.

If she came back to me, to be hooded or flown
at some bright chase, what could I say?
I would know again the slow drip
of incapacity; I would see again,
in the hollow of the moon, the hand
emptying, fading, a vanishing disk,
wearing away, fraying, consumed, a shell

of turqoise fading into violet, of cobalt
fading to lavender, its threads unraveling;
this old, this ancient, this sorry harridan,
more beautiful than any girl, more wise
than any master. Walk on. She follows,
an inescapable, unobtainable lamp;
she follows, this bruised eye of love.