And The Moon On Its Stem Will Steal You Away
By John Gallaher
That’s a good one, the idea of the moon having a stem and somehow
stealing you, whoever you are, kind of like Persephone or Orpheus,
portrayed or alluded to in countless forms of art and popular culture
including poetry, film, opera, music, and painting. And it kind of fits
my mood this morning, something vaguely cartoonish and devoid
of real gravitas, but still, a kind of realism, even so. And the area
around is the void, outer space, nothing, because explaining things
is never as interesting as wanting them, the desire to know, set against
a backdrop of black velvet and rhinestones. Let’s say that you wake up
one day and realize you don’t remember anything that happened
yesterday. Maybe for five minutes or so. And for those five minutes
you’re thinking, as I was thinking this morning, that this is it. Car keys.
The word for when you really want something and work for it.
Your dog’s name. There are not enough blank pages for all this
forgetting, like debris falling back to earth, you and yours hiding in
the underbrush with hopes of your own, of rescue or escape.
When you don’t remember why you’re hiding in the underbrush,
you’ve been hiding in the underbrush forever. This whole other
existence leaps forward in possibility. And then the five minutes
are up, and it’s oh yeah, eggs, Saturday. Some day that was.
A chemist once told me luminol was her favorite color. It glows
a beautiful greenish-blue when it comes into contact with blood
by reacting to the iron in hemoglobin, looking a bit like the sky
this morning. It’s a kind of truth of blue, that uncovers, that
remembers. It’s used by investigators to detect blood at crime scenes
where no blood is visible. There are so many things to forget,
to lose, and in so many different ways. But even so, one can be wrong
about the past, and deduce from error, but still be right about
the future or the present. And when you don’t remember what day
it is, happy birthday. Despite all our best efforts, there’s a wolf
on the horizon making a movie of your approach, and it’s
a shipwreck playing across me as I’m pouring sugar into my cup.