on the moon

Yesterday, Lucy and I drove to Austin and back, not to see the eclipse, but to see two wonderful friends of mine who happened to be there! They're in town for a couple of weeks, but we leave for New York and Boston on Friday and they leave Texas the same day we get back, so this was the only weekend we could manage. But we made it work, and I am so, so glad we did. Friends are so good!!

It was a long day, though, and by the time we got home I was way too tired to post a poem, even though we did go to Book People in Austin and I did buy like five new poetry books. I'll post a poem for yesterday at some point, but here is a poem for today, total solar eclipse day:

not back, let's not come back, let's go by the speed of
queer zest & stay up
there & get ourselves a little
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean
i was already moonlighting
as an online moonologist
most weekends, so this is the immensely

logical next step, are you
packing your bags yet, don't forget your
sailor moon jean jacket, let's wear
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter,

queerer moon gravity, let's love each other
(so good) on the moon, let's love
the moon
on the moon

—Chen Chen, "i love you to the moon &," originally published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day on May 31, 2021 and just an absolute and utter delight. Is it too cloudy to see the eclipse here? Yes. Do I care? No. It's still eclipse day! Let's love each other on the moon.

the universe is made of distance and of dust

I need to get back in the habit of posting poems in the morning, because I keep forgetting until late in the day, or forgetting completely—although in my defense, I have had houseguests (wonderful houseguests, but houseguests nonetheless) for pretty much two straight weeks. Anyway, my awesome friend ashpags, herself a badass lady astronomer, directed me to this wonderful poem inspired by Henrietta Leavitt.

      After Henrietta Leavitt, astronomer

The difference between luminosity and brightness
is the difference between being

and being perceived, between the energy emitted
and the apparent magnitude. O, to be

significant! To have some scope and scale!
Size and heat. Why not make that obvious,

ostensible, stretch it out for all the world to see?
Distance makes a world of difference.

The universe is made of distance and of dust.
More dust than star out there,

more crimson than cobalt from here, looking,
our eyes telling the truth slant

through the almost-nothing
of the universe’s finely grained mattering.

—Anna Leahy (b. 1965), "The Habits of Light" from Aperture (2017). You can read more about the poem, and Henrietta Leavitt, and watch Anna Leahy read the poem aloud (if that's your thing) at brainpickings.

a monster in the shape of a woman

I had dinner with a couple of awesome astronomers tonight, so this is sort of for them—though also because I love it, and because it's been on my to-post list for a long time, and because it's not really poetry month with Adrienne Rich.

                 Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)
                     astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster   

a monster in the shape of a woman   

the skies are full of them

a woman      'in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments   

or measuring the ground with poles' 

in her 98 years to discover   

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled   

like us

levitating into the night sky   

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness   

ribs chilled   

in those spaces    of the mind

An eye,

          'virile, precise and absolutely certain'

          from the mad webs of Uranusborg

                                                            encountering the NOVA   

every impulse of light exploding 

from the core 

as life flies out of us

             Tycho whispering at last

             'Let me not seem to have lived in vain' 

What we see, we see   

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain   

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse   

pouring in from Taurus

         I am bombarded yet         I stand

I have been standing all my life in the   

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most   

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15   

years to travel through me       And has   

taken      I am an instrument in the shape   

of a woman trying to translate pulsations   

into images    for the relief of the body   

and the reconstruction of the mind.

—Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), "Planetarium," 1968, from The Will to Change (1971), though in this case from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002). 

what doesn't change

Yesterday night, on the subway home from a very lovely evening of friends and birthday celebrations, I asked N. what poem I should post. She said, "a poem about a train," and I laughed and then went home and posted Neruda. But I kept thinking about train poems.

Roselva says the only thing that doesn't change  
is train tracks. She's sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery  
by the side, but not the tracks.
I've watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn't curve, doesn't break, doesn't grow.

Peter isn't sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train  
is a changed track. The metal wasn't shiny anymore.  
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.  
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn't change.

Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.  
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound  
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, "Trying to Name What Doesn't Change" from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland: Far Corner Books, 1995). As always, I love her.

half-tipsy with the wonder of being alive

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

—Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) "Great Things Have Happened," from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread, Nineties Press, 1993. (I first encountered this poem on tumblr, and tracked it down to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, which is an invaluable source for my National Poetry Month posts.)

To be fair, I do have a lot of feelings about the moon landing, although it didn't happen in my lifetime. (I frequently think fond, slightly sad thoughts about that one fic I wrote that one time about Steve Rogers watching the footage of the moon landing that I can't actually post because it's a sequel to a story I'm never going to finish and a prequel to a story I'm never going to write, and it doesn't really work out of context.) But anyway. I like this poem.

walls and stars

You know, I've never posted any Robert Frost? Here are two, since I missed yesterday (and with thanks, as is often the case, to wintercreek):

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulder in the sun,
And make gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there,
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

—Robert Frost (1874-1963), "Mending Wall" from North of Boston, 1914.

*

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud—
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, 'I burn.'
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

—Robert Frost (1874-1963), "Choose Something Like A Star," 1943.

I'm too tired and cranky to write about this at the moment, but if anybody wants to talk about Frost's metrics some other time, just let me know. METRICS ARE GREAT.

replica of the multiplying universe

A love sonnet, today. You may not see it in my Donne selection, this year, because I am trying to keep the Donne obsession under control -- circling around Donne the way my Donne class circled around 'The Canonization' -- but I have a thing about bodies and planets.

Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres,
porque de las praderas planetarias
otra estrella no tengo. Tú repites
la multiplicación del universo.

Tus anchos ojos son la luz que tengo
de las constelaciones derrotadas,
tu piel palpita como los caminos
que recorre en la lluvia el meteoro.

De tanta luna fueron para mí tus caderas,
de todo el sol tu boca profunda y su delicia,
de tanta luz ardiente como miel en la sombra

tu corazón quemado por largos rayos rojos,
y así recorro el fuego de tu forma besándote,
pequeña y planetaria, paloma y geografía.


I love the handful of earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.

Your wide eyes are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations;
your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteor through rain.

Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,

was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you—compact and planetary, my dove, my globe.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XVI from Cien sonetos de amor or One Hundred Love Sonnets, 1959, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

of bronze and blaze

My favorite Emily Dickinson nature poem is about winter, and it's not quite right for my mood, today. So:

Of bronze and blaze
The north, to-night!
So adequate its forms,
So preconcerted with itself,
So distant to alarms,—
An unconcern so sovereign
To universe, or me,
It paints my simple spirit
With tints of majesty,
Till I take vaster attitudes,
And strut upon my stem,
Disdaining men and oxygen,
For arrogance of them.

My splendors are menagerie;
But their competeless show
Will entertain the centuries
When I am, long ago,
An island in dishonored grass,
Whom none but daisies know.

~Emily Dickinson, CIX, "Part Two: Nature," Complete Poems, 1924.

pathetic fallacy

It's raining, and gloomy, which requires mopey Victorians. I briefly considered In Memorium, but A. E. Housman is the mopiest of all mopey Victorians, and I love him.

X.

The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze:

It sighs from a lost country
To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.

XI.

The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases
And I lie down alone.

The rainy Pleiads wester
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of
That will not dream of me.

~ A. E. Housman, Feb. 1893, "The weeping Pleiads wester," from More Poems.

Sometimes I kind of want to beat up Moses Jackson for making Hous all mopey, but that would probably be counterproductive. I nearly posted Diffugere Nives, actually, but I couldn't without The Invention of Love and Horace on hand. My favorite Housman poem is actually "From far, from eve and morning," but that's a travel poem and this is a depressing rainy day poem, so here we are.

I'm really liking this poem-a-day thing! I think I shall keep it up.