Moon River

To be sung:

The moon is a flying fingernail

A sail on an unseen boat, A secret code I am sending

The message of which I am lending to you;

The moon is encoded, 

“Say cheese.”

 an attempt at a prose poem, from a poetry writing class in college, 1991.

Road of Flame

The moon and its related tidal force are pulling at the waves of my brain, again … HA! … Just kidding. But I’ve read that Lunatic and Lunar share a common root, and I can imagine why. Why, a couple weeks ago, when the moon was waning into watermelon rind, it grinned at me between the passing clouds, luming in and out, in and out. And it came to me how Lewis Carroll got that image for his cat: Cheshire palpitating moon it was! Now the moon is fat again, and I with wife am standing on the riverbank, starring at a U-turn in the sun.

When it first rose of the distant shore it sat buoyant and bright like a cue ball…. No, like a golf-ball on a tee. You see that moon cut a torch stretching to our feet. You would have seen it too if you’d been there … Something like a cobblestone skim milk path…or, an inverted explanation point, or a part in the black hair of the world, or … Dear, I might be taking this a little far, but see, I was standing there, then began to walk downstream and it followed me like a little sister, or a shadow that just wouldn’t leave…. Just like that! I mean the light that hung between the moon and me. Then I asked my wife who was twenty feet away and she claimed that that light stretched straight to her.

How very odd; Could it be that that light which fell into my eyes as flowing ink, the water just before her feet, was really full of light and if a thousand people lined the bank everyone would find the same and then we would conclude that the whole dark mass was truly brilliant after all?

And If I were a centipede, a mile long, with an eye above each leg – I’d walk along the river thinking it to be a road of flame.

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