Notes by the Light of a Fading August Full Moon

82 degrees at 7 a.m. as I drove in to work, the light sick-wan, aged, toothy in the foreknowledge of another hot, rainless day. The threat of wildfires, odd for this time of the season, grows toward its own fullness; yesterday some broke out in Volusia County, the first rip in the seam. The August full moon was hanging late to the west, weighted and buoyed with summer’s aging roar, prescient of hurricanes we’ve yet to see, difficult days on the world’s stage yet to occur. But for now it’s just hot -- again.

***

Aging torch singer Tony Bennett, who recorded two albums with Bill Evans back in the ‘70s, said that Evans was tortured by his addiction, loathed what it did to him, and was desperate to keep all traces of it out of his music. In a “Fresh Air” interview I heard recently, Bennett said the last he heard from Evans was a phone call in 1980 when the pianist told him, “All there is is truth and beauty. Forget the rest.”

But the day does not forget, it consumes us with the rest, so loudly and wildly I sit down at my desk after the morning commute wondering just what all those achingly pretty sounds were that I heard long before first light -- how true, how beautiful, when they all disappear?



“Mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” That’s how the Scotland Yard spokesmen described the plot they had foiled, where plans were in place to blow up transcontinental flights from Britain to the United States using undetectable liquid explosives carried on board on carry-on luggage. If you are reading this today, certainly you have heard the news, about the huge pileup at Heathrow where no carry-on luggage is being allowed and enormous queues are trying to slog through the security tie-ups. So our past is with us, ever more present and future. Odd that all this comes out the day after Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” was released.

In Lebanon, 14 Israeli soldiers killed yesterday. The archetect of this sort of bulldozer response to terrorism, Ariel Sharon, lies helpless in a coma while his army flails with seeming futility in a war that cannot be won with bigger guns. American GI’s get picked off in twos and threes not by frontal assault but from the peripheries of roads leading out into the blank white sun. The Middle East a land so bright with its danger and conflict that its combustion isn’t easy to see -- the burning forest not visible for the individual flames which sear our daily eyes. I drive in to work behind a silver Lumina with patriotic festoons on back -- the ribbon for Support Our Troops, a bumptersticker that says “Be a Patriot Today - Thank A Veteran.” Inside a woman driving with the heads of two children barely visible. She checks me out in the mirror at a stoplight; how long has she been required to soldier on this way while her husband works far off in those fields of flame?




AUGUST MOON

These are true substances you see before you.
They are assigned here for inconstancy

to holy vows. Greet them. Heed what they say,
and so believe; for the True Light that fills them
permits no soul to wander from its ray.

-- Dante Paradiso III, 29-33,
transl. John Ciaridi

From Ciardi’s note (I paraphrase):
“Inconstancy” refers to spirits who made vows in Heaven and then either broke or slighted them.
They are “assigned here” in the sense that they
appear on the moon, the inconstant planet,
though each has a throne in the Empyrean.

***

A surprising augur of the sea
blisters now the night of this season,
welling blue lucence in lieu
of hurricanes which normally
chum the milk of heaven.
A moon old enough in summer to
bear an old man’s bruit, a
senex ire mowing like a
flint blade cross the pent knees
of the corn god, plowing
my scythed penis in regions
withered and goaty, grinning
Priapal absence over all
in triumphal robes of blue.
Lamp of an age, still furious
yet futile, the last bright coal
of desire burning the brains
of revenants yowling up
the guts of bottle clubs
to a single last wisped thunder.
Soon enough gone. I made
it there to here but by this
moon’s testament have
travelled no further in
these incessant matins
by lost seas, propounding a
surf of pale foam long ebbed
from the sighs of my beloved.
Like you my Lugnasa moon
I drone on, so harrowed
by blue hollows
that it’s easier to ferry
the rest of the way
the freight of my
dark knowledge
than dream of trying
to turn back. An empty
dank black hour, awake
when the world is not,
getting a few inchoate things
down on paper before
tossing my book to the
daily erasure. Today
moonlight is like a blue
echo of church bells
clamoring deep in the sea.
How much I wanted that
sound to be true, in the soft
slurs of her Yes. And how
much it now costs to
measure my progress
by the depth of the wound,
as if radiance of moonlight
was ever a measurable
amplitude of fresh pain’s
clarity of truth and beauty
which is both gall and honey.
Beatrice explained this
moon to the Poet as the
sum of all vows gone amiss
in the confusion of longing
and bliss: Holy enough
anyway, brilliant at cusp-times,
empty the rest, homebound
for sure, though no cup
I can hold will ever pour
the full mon of mid-August,
not here anyway,
perhaps not ever.
But then, it’s better than
gales against windows
boarded up and too dark
to set pen to paper.
I’m singing the chaunteys
writ on a bone boat
of a coffin sailing high
the lat sumer night’s seas:
My pen has hauled from
doom to fresh spoutings
as the moon of August
nailed my abysm back
between God’s starry thighs
smiling balefully upon
the swoon of my turn
from ends to wombs.