And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night . . . .
--Genesis 1:16

I can't remember the first time we said moon. We were
         lightheaded by then,
dizzy: moon-drunk. And then it was gone--the oddest thing,
          the new moon,
no moon at all, that slipping back and stunned again, and absence
          vast as a sun,
vaster, and everyone naked as fish in the black room of our
          dream. We spoke
in whispers. We crawled on our bellies through that hollow vowel
          as if
we believed we could breathe there, as though our whole lives
          were suspended,
flickering sparks in its long, dank length. There was no
          horizon, no edge to cut
the shadow away. We were bereft, less than lightless. We said
          it again, softly:
m-o-o-n, drew it out like a supple river; it echoed in a valley
          we could not see--
we had lost the moon! And, for that moment, we were voiceless
          with sorrow:
no moon to lift our impenetrable night, no breath of light
          beneath.
And the gaping mouth of our dream drank us in; we were moving
through the dark. We missed what we had become, what we'd seemed
          alongside
the extravagant light; we took its shape, we carried that absent
          moon on our backs
and we mourned: moon like a longing, terrible as a god. Moon the
          color of ivory, lit by flame.
Moon the color of palest flesh. Of absolution. Moon capable of
          setting the mountain on fire.
Moon as the blessing, gone now--that light by which we could
          not see. We cried: moon.

I I

Increscent Moon
(Moon as Incantation)

Nothing ever stood still: the black wind unsettled the absolute
          night,
and the dreamed moon stuttered. Its window of light swung open;
          the timorous rind
followed on the great bronze rump of the sun--antiphons of
          light and light--
and the white heartbeat carried us on its back, memory like a
          pulse, the leaping
river in our veins. Anticipation was silver fish at our throats;
          and hope
had its own rhythm. The crevice moon slid behind the feathery
          fir, beyond
branches like shadowy, many-winged birds, and dangled its thread
          of light
in that black ocean, the sky. We watched the dark play against
          the pale,
thin stream, urged the light to take on more; we sang its name
          over, sang
in bright waves, driven by the moon--moon barely there, a rent
          in the sky,
and then the moon unfurled: meniscus, half-eye, moon like a
          fist--
and the white mask turned toward us, its silhouette sharp as
          chipped stone,
its face like a dream of rough water. And it sang, descant, then
          out of control,
moon of a music we could not understand. It flooded the sky and
          we swam
in the pool of it, swam the moon spilling over, the length of it,
          the breadth,
moon in furious proportion, unfettered by songs we might sing.
          And when our feet
found the earth again, when we bent to the water to scoop up the
          moon,
it would not be contained. Moon of its own accord, we were
          nothing to it.
The woodlands flew apart, beat a thousand shades of dark against
          the sky,
and the waters ran like a dream of hope, fast, and white with the
          weightless moon,
bright as burnished stone until our shadows passed over.

III

Variant Moon:Eclipse
(Moon as Abstraction)

We must have closed our eyes. Something in the steep sky
          changed: the night
held its breath and a perfect black ate the moon. It moved like
          a whisper,
slow as a sigh; we didn't want to see it. But the whole sky
          stood still
while the moon gave in, while the darkest dark cast itself over
          the light.
And we waited and listened for the stopped heart of the moon
but it did not come. Its great eye closed; the precise dark slid
from the farther side, and it was gone--the moon shone down.
We were small lives, poised in the dark. And what was bright
has shrewd claws. But brilliant birds sang deep in the
          indistinct
trees; the sky was glass and slick as fast water. All these
          things
converged: what danced on the surface, what burrowed in the
          bone,
was mystery. We dream our lives. But the rivers breathe flint
          and spark
and, each night, we believe in everything--the shifting edge of
          light
and dark, the possibility of what we think we are, and what we
          think we see.

IV

Decrescent Moon
(Moon as Hypothesis)

And the whole world slows down. The moon exhales, breath like a
          bartering,
like a blowing away: moon in the past tense--what we have
          lived . . .
and light like a coin spent. This is the way absence is
          conjugated: the dark's
empty fist, its blind eye, the giving of night back to the night.
We peel it back like a skin and where there is black we imagine
white; we are the keepers of black and of white. And we are
          nothing.
And where there is shadow, we rise like the stream over stones,
          we cover
the canyon with singing the color of moons--even in the dark,
          some birds
wrestle with the idea of song. We are entire and seldom certain.
          And within the canyon
is another canyon. And a sky. The world is shortsighted. We
          speak
the language of tongues and fire. We speak bone and deep water.
          This throbbing
is the shape of expectation. And our hope is imperfect. We hear
          the present
like a whisper, like a rustle of bright fish in a night-colored
stream, like a stone deep in sleep. We carry the past like
          broken glass.
We call it moon. What we have learned. And the heart is a
          stone, is a bird
with dark wings, is a dream; we take with us its watery echo, at
          the bend
of our wrists, at our uncovered throats, visible as the landscape
          itself,
as the river beneath the changeable moon, and the mountains, the
          deepening chasms
which the black sky leans towards and lights with anticipated
          fire.