A Thousand Letters to the Moon

"A poet stands between heaven and earth
and watches the dark mystery.
To nourish myself I read the classics.
I sigh as the four seasons spin by
and the swarm of living things kindles many thoughts."
–Lu Ji, from The Art of Writing








1.

On a lowly sunday morning the fog stills to a quiet over the slate bay. Maybe there is a pair of pelicans left that, without my looking, I know that they are quietly paddling across the surface using their great yellow nets of beaks for the panfish. I am no longer drawn to moon or its attendant darknesses. Mystery is not of the darkness as so many shriveled voices have suggested; once past, it is the brightness of stars, of the theories of the origins, its ever expansion in galactic speeds, those crystals, how they meet upon the particulate and tumble down to register all of the colors, that is mystery to me. Two face, of course, to the moon, then. Of youth, the dark blotches poets cry of. That is the story of our unconscious. What lies below the surface of things? The fish which surfaces its silver abdomen from the depths just found out as he squirms inside the pelicans gullet. Have you seen a fish slap across the surface, mid-day, electric, under sun's gleam, untethered, free, juxtaposed against the depths. No need for the moon bottom shores. I had paddled through the flooding marsh. Just outside the reach of the forest border the main channel was full and released, as though a giant rake from above had loosened its surface and left furrows of silver and steel glistening, wave upon wave, and there I could see a sort of dance, a swimming, from fish eyes, looking up, wild, underneath nothing.