October 29, 2012

Well, dark and cold this morning when I went to leave for school, but the biggest full moon I have seen in a long time, huge and gold and bright in the light just before sunrise!  Wow!  I was driving facing it as it sank behind the line of trees, it was just mesmerizing.  And after it set the sun rising made orange and red streaks behind me in the very pale blue sky, seen in the rearview mirror.  By the time I got to school, the sky was the clear bright blue it's been for a few days now, but it was still cold, windy in gusts and in the 40s. 

Now behind me, the news is covering Sandy, and the huge size of its wind field, and we have nothing like that here.  Hard to imagine such wretched weather elsewhere when it's so clear and lovely here, but not hard to imagine a hurricane, the wind, the power out, the flooding.  I hope, though people there don't have much experience with hurricanes, that they take it seriously; they can be so devastating.  The pictures of surf and flooding already bad and it has not made landfall yet. The moon this morning a full moon that means higher lunar tides.  I hope everyone in Sandy's path takes precautions and evacuates if it's called for.  Last time we had one, I did not want to go but was really glad we did.

For the moon this morning a poem full of ways of looking at the moon . . .

Day Moon

Too late or too soon, none can say,

the lantern you hold out mere

rumor now, your desert Sea

of Tranquility nothing more

than dust, or less, dissolved at last

in the waters of the sun's rays.

You the dime that midnight lost

to the bright distance of a day,

the coin that rolled through a ruin

of stars, out the acropolis

of our dead gods. You the crown

that handed down its human place.

What is your vigilance if not

the scratched mirror of our light.

Constellations cast their net

in the morning sky. Too late,

says the sky, and yet too soon

to tell, to read your beaten riddle

of things to come, the afternoon

of those who walk each year a little

closer to the ground, who would pull

through the hole in you, the hole

of you, as if you were the portal,

the pupil, the wound that never heals.

A window to the sun that stares

at you there across the room,

you the Cyclops of the nightmare

sent to wander over the rim

of dawn, unconscious of a fever

daybreak brings. You who howled

in the throats of us believers.

We were children then who held

you in the evening of our eyes

the way a bowl of water holds

a drink, a face, a dark sunrise

worlds beneath the underworld.

Bruce Bond

So many ways of looking at something we see so often, Cyclops of the nightmare, window to the sun, coin rolling through a ruin of stars . . .  I thought of the men who stood on airless plains and saw earthlight the way we see moonlight.  Of all the lines that appeal to me it's the last lines that speak to me, children who held you in the evening of our eyes, as I did this morning, both the evening of my eyes and a new look, the rocky shore of the moon holding a sea, a face, and its own dark sunrise.  The window to the sun as I look out each morning to the changing light, and sometimes glimpse the moon before it sets.  And, especially today, those of us who walk each year a little close to the ground still marvel at the moon, still can't resist staring at it when it appears in its reflected glory to light up an early morning.