Half moon rising in the night
Its dark side does not shine
Sometimes I feel just half a man
Who cannot make you mine.
The half that glows in yellow light
Reflected from the sun
Is like my face alighted by
The gaze of my loved one.
The half that hangs so dark and still
Against the starry field
Is like my tortured soul whose pain
In absence is revealed.
The poet is a butcher
who flays the wild beast
and peels back the dusty hide
to reveal muscle and bone
and the heart that once beat beneath.
There is skill and art
in the way he carves the meat,
trims the fat, exposes the grain
of truth in the tender, succulent
morsels that nourish.
The poet is a diver
who plumbs the depths for pearls,
milky tears shed into the sea
by a god who could not bear
a beauty too fine and rare.
The strand of shining moons
that light her night-clad breast,
and the blood-red steak
on bone-white china,
remind the poet of what comes next.
Like discovering water on the surface of the moon —
sometimes love finds you in the beautiful desolation
of a dark and empty heart. No river, no lake-
filled crater, no rain to streak the lunar sky, just
a meager film of dew laid down in endless night,
but gather up the spread-thin droplets on the freeze-
dried ancient sea — oh lonely sky-flung traveler —
wet your long-parched lips, slake your love-
foresaken thirst, and drink in, too, the light-
pulsed words that shine across space and time
like the bright and smiling face of the full moon
that casts its glow upon the hills and lakes,
coyotes and junkyard dogs, soldiers and sailors
and ships at sea, and lovers strolling hand in hand
on the tide-turned shores of a far-off watery world.
Away you glide across the surface
of this Northwoods lake at sundown,
your paddle strokes strong and sure
and natural as breathing;
the water,
pink and blue reflection of the sky,
closing seamlessly behind your kayak,
leaving no trace of your passing through
this warm and windless September day
fading to night.
This is what leaving
would look like; this it how it feels
to be left on shore.
I will drink nine cups of coffee at nine;
I will plant nine acorns in nine holes
on nine hills;
I will serve nine platters of nine cupcakes
with nine candles;
I will send nine letters to nine editors
on nine serious subjects;
I will tell nine friends nine secrets
in nine languages;
I will feed nine sardines to nine cats
with nine lives;
I will follow the nine commandments
of the god of 729 names;
I will pleasure my ninth lover nine times
at her nine erogenous zones;
I will compose nine songs of celebration
for the eight planets
and Pluto, the cartoon dog.
Imagining the song of the New Zealand Tui bird
from ten thousand miles away is apt work for a poet,
blind cartographer of the wild uncharted places
of the human heart. The English, on first glance,
named you Parson Bird as you are clothed in a dark suit
with a white collar, but no droning sermonizer are you.
Is “tui” the sound you call to the ears of the Maori?
They say you possess two voice boxes — a poet’s envy –
so that your lovely bellbird-like notes are underlain
with clicks, cackles, groans and the creaks of wooden ships
on rolling seas, a concerto for flute and precussion,
and like parrots, the gift of human speech. You sing
to the full moon above the sparkling South Pacific.
Your wings beat loud and crisp like the flapping
of thumbed stiff pages in a new book of poems
or the card sharp’s shuffling that signals the deal.
I see you banking through dark dense forest,
your crest dusted with yellow pollen grains, drunk
on fermented flax nectar and joyful flight and life.
I hear your voice in the tinkling spoon in a cup of tea
of honeybush, cinnamon, cloves, horopito and ginger.
Your song drifts on the gentle morning breeze
off the cool September seas of the Hauraki Gulf,
wending through vineyards and olive groves,
from the beaches to the hilltops, aloft with
the sweet and tender musings of a fanciful mind.
Coyote, wise old trickster
shuffling ‘cross the road
under an August moon,
you look a little shaggy,
a little grayer,
but you and I know
the best blueberry patches,
the way across the swale,
how to step light
over a thin crust of windpacked snow,
when to chase
and when to lay in wait.
The moon casts
reflected sunlight
on the old familiar trails,
as the summer night
gathers memories
of distant, bygone loves,
and traces a crooked path
upon my dark betrodden heart.
I just need to write this down fast as a beginning — much work ahead, not much here but a rough idea, a feeling that I can’t capture yet
November born, we were still 17
but college IDs were good enough
for Urbana bars in those days
and nights, like when we straddled
the double yellow line that marked
the border with Champaign, serenading
that ripe old prairie moon
with Neil Young and Bob Dylan,
call and response like a prayer
ricocheting from town to town
and back, finding our rhythm,
blending slow and sweet, then
fast and wild my hands
your hips a drunken reverie:
(Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Sundown, yellow moon,
Yellow moon on the rise,
I replay the past,
Big birds flying across the sky,
I know every scene by heart,
Throwing shadows on our lives,
They all went by so fast.)
We shared pitchers of warm beer
my flannel shirts
drags on your cigarettes
a twin bed beneath a window
and Jack Kerouac:
(The air was soft, the stars so fine,
The promise of every cobbled alley so great,
That I thought I was in a dream.)
Two far out hipsters in frayed jeans
holding hands across the monumental Quad
skipping to the boom boom beat
of our young and joyous hearts
listening for the far off rumble
of the raw American Midwest
holy night barreling west
across the big river
to the Great Plains
and the mountains and deserts
and sea beyond, end of the world
Which is where I went.
What could I share with you now,
Ghost lover from beyond the horizon?
My oldest child is just like we were then.
My daughter’s a reader, like you.
My youngest is named for Sal Paradise.
I lived in Mexico and learned to read
Neruda and Lorca in Spanish.
And what could you tell me?
Is the Tasty Freeze still by the lake
in the town you left behind?
Does the harvest moon still shine
sunflower yellow on the upturned
faces of young lovers?
Would you believe it if I
read you this poem
And would you kiss me one more time?
In the Dunes
2 a.m., 2-below, bivouacked downstairs
under the south window, adrift
in the dunes with Port and Kit.
We’re bouncing in the back of the truck
from El Ga’a to Sbâ , sirocco blown grains
of snow, typhoid fever death chill gale –
only one of us will return.
Down, down the deep well of night
paralyzed by the thought that
the sky hides the night behind it,
shelters the person beneath
from the horror that lies above.
Consulting Madame La Hiff’s Gypsy Dream Dictionary
waiting for a sign in the indolent heat.
Later – has it been minutes or weeks?
– the full moon breaks through the ground blizzard
like a midday Sahara sun. I wish I were
on the terrace of the Café d’Eckmühl-Noiseux
under the awning a-flap in the soft evening breeze
reading the maps, or on the surface of the immaculate moon
aloft in the center of the sheltering sky.
