Moonrise corresponds across a realm of remembered nights.
Underfoot, memory’s monochrome loyalty. Simple images
repeat themselves, separate times and places and things
made fluid.
Memory razes all: seaside community, northernmost pearl.
The moon rises
from a lake
valleyed in snow,
and further down,
at water’s edge,
the dense, loose crush
of forests.
The moonrise gives birth to the mountains, stone creatures
huge as nightmare, casting their shadows half a night’s walk
to the ocean. To the child unable to sleep,
in the seaside town at desert’s edge, moonlight sizes everything up,
from giant to grotesque to god.
Compression of space is meaningless at six years old.
At six years old, big is big.
Winds come off the ocean and winds come down from the mountains.
In the empty park at the center of town,
they circle each other in a flirt
that might close with a knife fight,
or a chin-thrust, head-nod, walkaway.
The night birds shut their eyes tight against temptation.
The thin, copper air of the Atacama desert
has always been dry, always,
and there is both pleasure and instruction in the word ‘forever’, when
said with such certainty. It ranges forwards and backwards,
with the now of today, tonight, like a yellow bobbin bouncing
at the taut center of time’s line, where no desire, no prayer
can change anything at all.
What was once the very edge of the conquered world
is now the middle kingdom between what’s lost and what’s forgotten.
Moonrise corresponds across the static desert,
through the deserted streets, and out across the imperceptible dip
of the breakers,
where the sea still thunders for anyone who chooses to listen.