“Two Poems on the Full Moon”, & the Border Sky

In gazing even upward,
I saw a cloud-sprent autumn sky
Perforated nearly 
By the waxing lunar eye;
A rainbow wrought in cirrus, 
Rounding perfectly and still.
One hallowed image crafted 
Just to, momentary, lie.

And in that vap'rous sheercloth,
Like a veil upon the night,
I sought to find some meaning
In an arc of prismed light.
But soon the wind had carried all
And left me in its chill,
With scattered useless symbols
And my own occluded sight. 

But on another misty night,
Just one more about round,
That disc lay fully clothed from sight.
Yet I, upon the ground:

Heedless of the snowdrift blown,
While in darkness - and alone -
Without aid of visions shown
I found a meaning all my own.

November 22nd, 2018

Hermit Thought

Back-to-back (on, uh, a 28 day interval) occasions. Growing up on a family dairy farm in the rural Quebec belt of northern Vermont provides, from a young age, ample opportunity to inspect a clear night sky. I’d wager big-P Psychology would find little kids in general have a tendency to develop that predilection in areas where the gazing is good. Comparative Mythology certainly makes me think that would be the case.

In my case, developing a faculty of wonderment was certainly nurtured by less-spoiling levels of light pollution than your average 90s Canadian/American Millennial, even compared to those of my friends who grew up in “town” (a metropolis at the time of <2,500 people). Actually, we still used the term in “the village”, if I recollect correctly; and that geographic distinction mattered in terms of interest and social dynamic. I, for example, may have been the only member of the schools’ more digitally-inclined clique (gaming, internet culture, “higher” education) to have grown up on a farm, with the other farm-based boys trending towards more analog interests (forestry, rural community, technical education). Interesting thought, that. But unlike the townies, I got the benefit of the woods and fields: to know Nature, to witness how Autumn’s harvest season was sown as a human system, extrapolated by intellect from and built gloriously upon the natural cycle of plants in Spring. And to become acquainted early with Mortality, the red animal counterpart of that earlier green circle, the black to the gold, the bone to the branch, the heart to the sun; see human life and human death writ within the domesticated herd, flock, and companion animals (“horse, dog , cat” – in the order “contributed most to society”), see the birth of a calf, watch the ducks return in April, favor the runtish kitten who’d one day ride easily on your shoulders as a full grown cat while you worked, and bury the turkey who’d warble to “Silver Bells” after he got killed by a fox.

And I also got the stars.

My earliest memories of the night sky all involve winter solitudes between our house and barn. Apparently, when the generational torch passed from my Quebecois grandfather to my naturalized dad, whatever part of the fire stipulated morning chores got extinguished. Thus, I (looking at it now, regretfully) never got to familiarize myself with what the early dawn had to offer. Not until staying up all night at LAN parties. Venus is still a novelty to me when I see Her on morning commutes or finishing an overnight shift. But, distinctly I remember, chill Novembers and Decembers where I’d stop twice to look up for awhile, often in below freezing weather (and the winters really were worse then, look at the meteorological data, ZOOMER). The stop while walking to chores always had a different character than when returning from chores to the house. Back then, past daylight savings, a Nintendo-laden afternoon would die into darkness before supper at 4:30, yielding to a trudge uphill alone for the eldest child whose younger siblings weren’t yet (and insultingly never would be) expected to come scrape shit, spread sawdust, rake out hay to the heifers, feed the calves by bucket or bottle or good god damn the ones trying to learn the fucking bucket but want a bottle (I heard that word at school, but I perfected it on that task), and pretend to clean the milkhouse (bottles half-assedly rinsed, pretend to other tasks, check out how much the drip of cleaning acid from the pipes has already eaten that new concrete wall dad just put in, but it’s cheaper to repair the wall than the instruments I just realized). And you can see how that reality might make a digitally-inclined boy eager to run back to the television and Final Fantasy III (US) and conversely very reluctant to arrive at the Augean Stable. My steps were likely to slow naturally on the way up to the barn, to a pace they wouldn’t slug to until morning walks to Plant Biology in freshman year of college. In my innocent grumbling, I’d trundle along peevishly and just look around for anything to anchor my interest on for an extra ten seconds. And I’d look at the stars, standing out of the circle of light from the solitary municipal streetlight my dad had somehow gotten the town to keep re-bulbing on “not his” dollar, but always in the little Venn diagram shade made at the gore with the light from the milkhouse door so as not to get too dangerous in the monster-inhabited night. It’s possible those inexperienced eyes glared a venomous resentment up into space, so cosmic was the wrong I perceived being done to me by the condition of not being back in the living room, then the largest injustice I could conceive.

Eventually, these pauses of willful distraction would find a counterpart on the return trip, in the odd moment where I’d spare precious time from the mad dash back (to warmth, to light, and a grey controller) and briefly look up again with thoughts unclouded by frustration. And those moments began sometimes to occasion a longer stay of observance, despite the wind-punctuated dark spitting at my cheeks and the drifting cold that always found its way up baggy sleeves into protesting depths in the hollows of hand-me-down jackets. The stars that were there at first as a projected taunt, a phantom raspberry imagined in the steam boiled up from my own simmering annoyance, became rather an audience to applaud the finale of labor’s nightly play and the close of the milkhouse’s hand-me-down door. And thus, by the merit of their own splendor, the winter stars of that border sky transformed my childish and bitter thoughts into something more sweetly appreciative, planting a nascent impulse which one day blossomed into the grown man’s sentient gratitude. A gratitude I attempt express in writing.

October’s moon, memorably visible through a veil of cloud at the radiant core of a prismatic circle, made for predictably poetastic consideration after hopping from the work-night into the driveway of my then-home. But my perception at the time was considerably jammed with distress. I first looked up into that night’s image as to lighthouse, hoping its lunar guidance could turn onto the unilluminated turmoil within me and shade in some contours for understanding; however, anything I hoped to have seen remained unrevealed, nested to the lee of light like shadows at the far side of a hill. So, see what childish impulse arose: the recourse to bitterness, my own shade cast at empyrean light. But ah! The adult at least could spin something useful out of that emotion, once it itself became the object of focus.

Contrast to the November moon: it itself wasn’t visible. I could only infer it was a full moon by the brightness extruding here and there at the edge of clouds (and confirmed there out in the cold via the Google). Four weeks had done a wonder on my sate of mind and that second chance recognition of an astronomic cycle amused me right into a complimentary mode of thought. Here where no moon was even visible, I felt that natural gratitude spring into life and jus became content sans answer, sans epiphany, sans even a better poem (as I think the October stanzas are better). There, at 29, was the same division of mindset represented by the walk to and the walk from the barn at 9: what bitterness you project out at the world pulls a curtain on the light it can project into you. And also, that once you know light, you can find it even in darkness.

And, I’ll be good god-damned if it isn’t another coincidental full moon that I can’t see a ray of as I write that. How appropriate. Good night.