Over the Moon and Back Again [by Heidi Seaborn]

In an MFA workshop last summer, an acclaimed poet declared that the moon was over, that it had been over used and needed to be relegated to the poetry graveyard with ravens and heart. Just like that. Done. The MFAs took note. No more moons.

But I’m not yet ready to yield the moon. Instead I find myself now obsessed with it, guarding it from extinction. Like Diana, I hunt for moon references. Pounce on moon sightings. I keep an eye on the moon when it rises at night, as it lingers in the sky by day. I wane as it wanes, I am filled by its fullness. When a Super Moon blasts a hole in the night sky, I can’t look away, letting its spotlight hold me, entranced. I’m not alone. Google the recent Super Blood Wolf Moon and you’ll find over 55 million results. For one moon, on one night.

When the moon eclipsed the sun a couple of years ago, the world looked up in wonder. The poets wrote. It’s cultural. Remember moon pies and Michael Jackson performing The Moonwalk? It’s historical. Remember Neil Armstrong’s real walk on the moon? Or just watch First Man and pretend you were alive then.

In fact, the moon stars in nearly 1,000 movies according to IMDb. We croon to the moon, whether we are music fans of Oscar Peterson, Neil Young or Pink Floyd. Amazon lists over 20,000 albums and 60,000 books with moon in their titles. On poets.org, there are 107 pages of moon references. The poet Lillo Way has a prize-winning chapbook Dubious Moon [Slapering Hol Press] that is nothing but moon poems. Here’s one from Way’s book that captures the sensuality of the moon, its powerful draw:

Frame the Moon

Furred out, cased, paned and trimmed,
the opening of a window.

From my position here on the floor
in supine half-spinal twist,

my quarter-revolving eye catches
a perfectly sliced-in-half moon centered

in the upper right corner of the upper
left pane of a window blued by a sky

somewhere between baby-boy daytime
and electric-transvestite midnight –

the perfect globe cleavered by
a celestial butcher-boy –

the first half of hope, not the last,
depending, I suppose, on your viewing point,

mine being spine suppliant to floor,
floor kissing earth and holding the kiss,

earth sucking me hard, the half-moon
mullioned and muntined,

one four-millionth of a light-year away,
beaming me up and off from here –

half an inkling that, when the bones wave
their white phalanges of surrender

to whatever pulls us down – some unthing,
some weightless, scentless, tasteless,

wan thing, draws me up into a moon’s
glowy, showy, half-assed bliss.

 

The moon rules the tides of our oceans, of women’s bodies. It may orbit our earth, but we are in its powerful cosmic sway. Even Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “I’m Over the Moon” [Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press] where the moon is dismissed as: “A kind of ancient/date-rape drug” and “It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band./Better off alone” acknowledges it is the lover we can’t ever truly leave. Maybe we are destined to howl at the moon in our poems, to shoot past cliché to discover the ancient and constant inspiration of our one and only moon.

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

Agreed -- the moon is underrated. Thanks. dl

[Sydney]

Heidi,
I had saved this article to read after we met in Paris and we heard these comments mentioned here; how goes your moon these days? I hope well, and perhaps we muse upon that same moon together from our separate seats but both bask in its glow and dream a common dream: of old, wonderful things, like the moon, and how they never grow old when we see them again after some time apart- and how every time we look, we wonder once again how we could ever have gone so long without them always in our eyes. Full or simply a small slice, may the moon today be a birthday cake with fireworks, burning for you like a Bastille Day celebration, the night revealing how much friends make the moon worth looking towards together, whether champagne or Paris, or a vast space, perfume or fog, a blanket or a bed, together.