This entry is part of Getaway Reads, a weekly e-mail series curated by Stephanie Cawley that features the writing of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway faculty.
Facts About the Moon
by Dorianne Laux
The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.
Dark Charms
by Dorianne Laux
Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.
© Dorianne Laux. “Facts About the Moon” is found in Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton, 2007), and “Dark Charms” is found in The Book of Men (W.W. Norton, 2011).
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Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are The Book of Men (Winner of The Paterson Prize and The Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry) and Facts about the Moon (Winner of the Oregon Book Award). She is co-author of a handbook on writing, The Poet’s Companion, all from W.W. Norton. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions, as well as three fine press editions, Superman: The Chapbook, Dark Charms, and The Book of Women, from Red Dragonfly Press. The Book of Men was reviewed in the New York Times as one of five books of poems suggested for summer reading; shortly after its release in February, 2011, it reached number one on Amazon.com’s Bestseller list, beating out Tom Waits and Tupac Shakur. Laux teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. You can read and listen to some of her poems here.
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Want to study with Dorianne Laux? At the 2013 Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway, Dorianne will be leading three sessions of Advanced Poetry Writing. Click here to find out more.
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Advance your craft and energize your writing at the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway. Enjoy challenging and supportive sessions, insightful feedback, and an encouraging community. Learn more.