Moon

I saw the moon you looked at too. I am glad you saw it. I am glad you told me you saw it. I was in my truck. I wanted to pull over, park and sit out in the field on its highest point and look. Just to look at the moon , an old friend.

Earlier that evening I had read W. B. Yeats’ poem , “Adam’s Curse”. His moon was an earlier moon – a dusk moon.

“And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.”

And I remembered Michael Herr’s moon in his book, Dispatches, concerning Vietnam.

“the moon came up nasty and full, a fat moist piece of decadent fruit.”

I thought of these two moons as I looked at my moon. My moon was hooked in the sky much later than W.B.’s, so it wasn’t “washed” out looking, it was a big splatch of yellow, but not the yellow of “decadent fruit” like Michael’s either. My moon was the moon of an exuberant child who had colored outside the lines with a massive yellow crayon. The yellow spilled over into the sky – greater than the image itself. Larger than life. Yet it was still a two dimensional moon. Why?

I never did pull over to sit and watch, but kept driving to the bar while watching the moon and having these thoughts rumble through my head.

The bar was kind of nice – the music 60’s rock & roll, I danced, but I am the type that ends up entertaining the old women and the fat girls. I guess being single and kind of faded I am prey to all sorts of desperate people. But it was distracting recreating the movements and rhythms of an earlier time.

I came home and wrote, “the moon looked like someone colored outside the lines”.

This morning you called and mentioned the moon. I wanted you to know I saw it too. And I have.