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Lunar Velocities |
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| Much written about the moon deals with a fickle courtesan
troubled by her profile. She's said to be a great repeater, to take the path of a younger age and shrink from sight. Those who love her pale trysts rue that she meets the beetle-browed stevedore as eagerly as the timid antiquarian. What shifty moods, centerless passion-- nothing to do but go wait for her in an empty museum or down by the wharf. And now fragments begin to bother the devotees: the mug temper cracked or Megarian shards pose too doubtful a jigsaw ever to reconstruct. |
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Although much has been written about the moon, few grasp the real one isn't ours. Along a sister orbit we find a moon undressing for bed, mirror and powder in an adjoining room. Neatly ordered as her reclining thoughts, the slim surfaces of her toilette glint like the ocean far beneath. There one captain, intimately acquainted with her true haunt, plots a course as confident as the North Star grants. From a fitful sleep she recalls, dependable dame, the shoes he brought, how they proved too tight, and how the couple chatted amicably on a foreign shore, then bid good night. |
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Many legends surrounding our moon--that her gleam turns the edge
of razor and Spanish sword, that concrete should not be poured at the full, that she drowns Chinese poets dexterously as a farmer pups, that she drives the werewolf mad with longing for her hidden roses, that vegetables thrust to her undine urge--are mensual superstitions against which we chart her actual, radiant curves. Really the water-widow acts in tandem with the sun to promote tides; as to her famed affinity with madmen and poets, let us not forget that even lucky faces discover their lineaments in regrettable mirrors. |
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Many kingdoms the moon touched thought she made a progression of changes that had shed little light on the scope of her course. Tunisa, Morocco, St. Helena, Barbados; Babylon, Sumeria, Athens; marbled Venice and its doge, Ecbatana and the promenade, Is with its wonderful doors gone under the waves: each imagined that the moon appeared in a new guise to an old locale. But bees chirring by sweet walls, badgers cradled in remote dirt, Egyptian house cats lapping milk from ewers knew that that moon spread like a fan, or curling to touch her toes, was all they'd get. |
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For centuries the moon was chaste and continent, attending nocturnal chores. Then she fell in love, one of those dark affairs the Middle Ages spawned. Relatively fit and young, she took to her bosom an old man. One Prometheus, by accounts that survive: not a few commentators hint pure pity bedded him. He'd loll about in musty furs, uncouth barbarian to the core, though of a mind so nobly tuned, she acceded to his sturdy desire. Dropping to her divan they counted far-off lights: lonely candles, watch fires, and inquisitors on torchlit errands. |
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Few, O moon, address you as I shall. The planets and their paths
were never round, and every star exploded from an untold center. Flung in a whirling drum, gems and heavier metal sank to cold worlds, leaving our own by the sun poor to enrich those barren of air, indeed of any life at all. Reflect on a Uranus mulched in diamonds, a Pluto whose onions are gold, some priceless ore a carrot garden, planets flanked, like a Turk's bridle, by silver moons. What rich man loves a timid atmosphere? |
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| Now I must tell of you as men do who crave a thing
almost forgotten, like the sandwich eaten on a lonely railroad platform years before--I met you once when you bathed. Withdrawing from the window in alarm I glimpsed a hip, an arm, a thigh not connected--a pose of unalloyed surprise, a blade brightness forged and water tempered. Maybe I'm shy. The retiring don't hastily pluck what chance offers, so I have never reckoned with all I saw. What did scatter you, my shock when we collided, or your own glance, turning superbly bold? |
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