"[…]
…. the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy"
— E.E. Cummings
Falling Song
January
sky's skin
crisp and dark,
mottled and lain out
over artemisia and yarrow
leather left to dry. While it caught light
with a flare ascending, ascending too long whose
flame menaced all with ruination. This sudden fear
of falling by the atom nearly killed us anyway, but one shaded woman
singing over in the alley, muddy-shoed, …ain't got long
to stay here. My feet start goin' down and I got to follow.
I clutched to your forearms.
And then the fire left gravity altogether.
February
sky whose baled
clouds scuttled quickly
stale smoke coming down over
drowning cattails, thirty-nine degrees inclined, bodies
molten lead and gas alight. A great wreck;
we hoped it came from out,
way out, Leonids or the moon landing.
Not just from January. Just ask the ladies
in the rec center, they dream of being
unmoored. Only astronauts know to be
weightless is to be falling without end.
To see men fly, thinking
they're moths; they've seen
Icarus and thought how kind to be
the one that falls.
His old man hears
the sound of
weight,
impact—
but not the fool boy,
his slight body sprawled.
Even in downfall, at Pappy's,
as birds circle, hungry
and men outside document wreckage
under moonlight, a chorus rises,
…bound a-way, bound a-way,
'cross the wide Missouri
i. New Moon No Fear
If I wake up I itch with little Vs of cactus hair. Then should I smell like cowboy cologne, You are looking at me, I notice only Then you are awake, and looking at me. If I wake up, the sun is out And I cannot see It is beaming into my window with blue and solar noise World is moving. Then where is my bed? where If I wake up, I am made of fire. Surely this means I'm less than one person, maybe now a caloric bomb. How many is a fire? If I wake up the street fire beating And there is a suspension of parade outside. Then a man walks Into Through me he is blind is a long-haired cat on his shoulder And a folded hat says watch it Kid. If I wake up and watch where fire the dutch door is open Then everyone can see me unshaven in bed. Watch for suspension of shame. Float If I wake up. The world is dark but there are still stars, If I look up they wink on or off under moving branches. I know where the moon but there are only stars there too. I must have found it beautiful once Now there is a cork stopping the sky. If I look down where beating moon breaks fire and a black disc splits my optic nerve, Then watch a shadow play of your hair dance on Mare Imibrium and watch. If I wake up the screen is bright beating fire, drafted essay about poetry suspended on the stomach and about lightning and flashlights and watch for bed Then I don't know how to see If I wake up, Then If car window is hot, Then there is a truck on fire on the freeway bed. If it is close to the dead rancher's golden grasses, in Random range Hark, California, how much is a fire? Then we could trade it for a stormcloud. Listen If I wake up my fingers beating, on piano keys If I look like shit and smell like dried spittle fire. Then I thought it was a movie soundtrack, says a girl from the collapsing dorms in bed If I wake up in the haunted arms of fire you told me not to love And she loathes me to touch her Choice Then I think it must have started like this in bed You need good care, not easy care If I wake up you remember who I am. And if I am not just her? Had you not concussed beating when you flew like a bullet off the motorbike crashing Then you should have told me to love you instead Where words short If I wake up I have run out of the sacred suspension; the needle in my leg is Socket only pumping air. Then my breasts are sprouting hairs. If my nipples look too young. I am waking up While the plane is turning. Then my eyes stay closed. If cable is severed. And window is frosting. Then the air is cool. If Moon is shut. Then Sky is null.
ii. Waxing
At NYU I was seated at a Q-and-A with Anne Carson speaking. She had just published Red Doc>. Machine-myth sequel to the early novel; once her work was hungry, sprawling red. Something had changed. Some student asked her that evening What did you feel when you wrote, so she said Nothing. and so vividly a nothing. This the woman once writing tangos of the husband: It was not like therapy. It was lingual exercise. The student of fire wilted, diminished, said So it was all a simple game?
I do not think of games as simple.
I recounted this to you, on the phone, we were scattered on the picnic field eating roasted garlic. You crudely joked about that Carson going on testosterone, meanwhile I was looking at the moon in the blue sky, which was like a chalice; or a cherub testing at my mettle. But you weren't really there? And she didn't really say that?
No, I agreed. She did not.
iii. Waning
We were in the desert
of a cool desert
mind
saw the boys turn it glass,
shook off the last sand and we moved
cityways,
saw the men
in business skins
would polish the moon
to a mirror should it
shine more.
Every slab is
clean and each brick
machine-meant and
they rise and shine. Righting about canyons like the weight
of law.
I feel it coursing ice
behind steeple
and office
with herring clouds
and a-swingin behind
them a thrown stone,
No it don't rattle, but it chides,
Once you fell upon me like rain.
Will it be the last of the
world to go? Carson,
If all we've got of stone is brick and beam
what to do with the moon?
iv. Full Moon DX
In the last days of the internet we broke
the law of sound. My room once a chatroom
opened like a tunnel unto other air. My bed was your bed
was no walls between us my voice straight to yours
via window via cable via long Atlantic via telegram. (This was IRC.)
In the last days of the internet we blithely followed the law
of seeing. Meta so sweet kept our words museum-winged
we dropped plainly into like archives or yellowed office cabinets.
Discord a place no place on the earth but dis-
embodied, like a whiteboard itching bread! milk!
trash goes out on monday! and who should need to be so present
for a nagging?
:
Moon she
keeps no notes.
Carson, you best be listening,
I should tell a story, if you could hear my voice,
like we're back in the same room like old,
my words gone out in the water as if bottled. Something
rattles me tippy-toe against this antenna, tilt wide on
the sea-hands toward the sky, moon mine
a dish of candy. It demands a perfect night. My boat rocks
slow now stilling, whose plastic shifts and braces;
all day I watched the big wave coming, a fortress
broken against the horizon, and waited anxiously with ladyfish
dashed, under transceiver-hummer, under the deck.
The water is composing a perfect form. Now if I can
beat its curve, I was gonna tell of myself a hammer
on your guitar in Mojave Moon! Mooon!
and moonrise looked like we
in blue rock were up there, as in common
with comets. That the time you saw me fall asleep grasping
at the forearms of a cactus, looking up and hoping
to glimpse your lamp spark in the mirror.
You watching me breathe wide with spikes,
the yucca moth land between us
in moonlight. I'd sing you
Prine and Welch and you
could sing along—and you won't have died or
turned your receiver away? Towards manifold stars
their whorled fingerprints in scuds of fog. You must keep the antenna
spun fast; hold till impact, the two seconds till you hear me,
the time for words to meet the moon, orbit
and turn back, to fall upon long and severed cables
in hot gas and blood rain. I will have left the sea; The math is so easy.
All that once was distance. All this radio was once
sound. If in these moments after signals sent
my throat is spilled across the sky Then
in these moments we win the space race
cuz how they call it moon bounce
it was once a game.
Once romance was a good
pastime.
Published as part of Anthology 2023.
XVIII: The Moon.
