Moon

The moon – well, wouldn't you feel 'terribly upset' to be rubbished by the unfeeling likes of young Romeo? »Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief...«

Personally, I've had a number of exciting, silvery encounters with the full moon – perfect for going loopy!!

When I would ask my father how large the moon really is, he would tell me that if it fell to Earth, it would fit in the Pacific ocean. Twenty years later, the thought of the moon falling to Earth and missing the Pacific Ocean still scares me.

There is a full moon tonight. I want to dance naked under it, in a meadow full of grass and flowers. But I dare not, for my yard is the dirt of the desert, and I fear my mother would find reason to suspect something.

I see the moon, the moon sees me, the moon sees the one that I want to see. So god bless the moon, and god bless me, and god bless the one that I want to see.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape. The eyes lift after it and find the moon. The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. How I would like to believe in tenderness! The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

In the pale yellow light
Of a pale yellow moon
Her lips spoke her life
Into the mist of doom

Her spirit arose
To the deep purple sky
The night owls were watching
Now you know why they cry

The old man sat watching the shadows as they trembled in this patch of light, until the sun went down; and when it was night, and the moon was slowly rising, he still sat in the same spot.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars. Inside the church, the saints will be all blue, floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. And the message of the yew trees is blackness – blackness and silence.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, white as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet with the gape of complete despair.

I had a crescent-shaped man-in-the-moon tattooed on the back of my right shoulder back in 1996, to remind me that life is forever changing in appearance, but constant in its true form – »omnia mutantur, nihil interit«: everything changes, but nothing is truly lost, another metaphor for »this too, shall pass«