Moonlight Looming in Memory

No Ansel Adams
but the snapshots we captured
through the open car window
on our eight megapixel cell phones

on the side of the road off an exit ramp
as truck taillights streaked eastbound
opposite the earth’s rotation
in startling calm that evening
a mere dot-glow above dun fields

Look, life is like this, filled
with moments of meaning
paid attention to or not
but we tried we lingered

and sure enough it is here
looming in memory-mind
the fat orange ball above horizon
inching up into blank navy air
the full moon in early spring

we drove toward in silence
~Twyla M. Hansen “Moonrise, Aurora, Nebraska” from Rock. Tree. Bird. 

photo of supermoon by Harry Rodenberger

I now take photos of a cherished moment; before owning a camera, I only took brain snapshots. In my memory, I tend to embroider and edit what I see to make things stick. Usually, photos tell the real story.

However, moon glow is always better in my memory than it is in my photos. The lucent light is something I can feel more than see. Last night, moonbeams woke me by touching my sleeping face. That glow in the shadow of our bedroom was at once ethereal and palpable, something a photo simply can’t capture.

Still, I attempt to preserve these moments to share with others. I linger longingly whenever my eyes are drawn to such a heavenly light, hoping it might touch and illuminate us all.

photo by Josh Scholten
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Why Not Stop and Do Nothing For A While

You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.

The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.
~Billy Collins “The Chairs That No One Sits In”  from Aimless Love

I don’t take enough time
to do nothing.

I think about doing nothing all the time
but then I do nothing about it.

Too many lonely benches on porches
so many empty chairs
too many vistas unnoticed
so many birds singing with no one listening

all deserve an appreciative audience,
someone who is simply there to see and hear and be.

Perhaps today.
Possibly today.
Maybe, just maybe,
today.

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The Honey of Afternoon Light

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
~Lisel Mueller “In Passing”

Each one of us is like a swelling bud hanging heavy and waiting on the stem —
already but not quite yet.

Such is the late afternoon light of a mid-spring day.
There is an air of mystery in a honeyed moment of illumination
knowing something more is coming.

Not just the inevitable darkness when we all must give up the light to sleep.
Not just opening wide to what we cannot yet understand.
Not just peering through a glass darkly.

Breaking into blossom means opening fully,
into the glow of full ripeness,
to become part of the light itself.

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That Kind of Day

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
~Billy Collins  “Today”

This is the kind of morning that begs to be admired from dawn’s first moment:  everything emerges from the fog so sharp, vividly bathed in golden light.

It takes my breath away at the same time as it delivers it deep within me.

How might I spring others free as I now have been sprung?

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Hard to Say

Sometimes I like to hide in the word
foxgloves – in the middle of foxgloves.
The xgl is hard to say, out of the England
of its harbouring word.
Alone it becomes a small tangle,
a witch’s thimble, hard-to-toll bell,
elvish door to a door. Xgl
a place with a locked beginning
then a snag, a gl
like the little Englands of my grief,
a knotted dark that locks light
in glisten, glow, glint, gleam
and Oberon’s banks of eglantine
which closes in on the opening
of Gulliver whose shrunken gul
says ‘rose’ in my fatherland.
Meanwhile, in the motherland, the xg
is almost the thumb of a lost mitten,
an impossible interior, deeper than forests
and further in. And deeper inland
is the gulp, the gulf, the gap, the grip
that goes before love.

~Zaffar Kunial “Foxglove Country” from England’s Green

I can get lost in a word when considering its origins. Sometimes it is how it looks on the page or screen that sucks me in, other times it is how it rolls off the tongue, or how it fits amid other words, like a musical note in a symphony. At times a word can seem an argle-bargle of nonsensical sounds, as if I’m listening to a foreign language.

This poem dissects an ordinary word like foxglove into letters and sounds in a way I have never considered, so that the flowers growing wild in our yard contain unexpected depth and width. Even eglantine is an elegant way to describe wild rose blossoms.

I love looking deep into the pinkish speckled innards of foxglove, lined up just-so in bell-like columns on a stem. I love the thought they were named as if they were little mittens a fox might happen to step into for a trot down the road. I love the thought of foxgloves being part of a glowing glistening fairy world that I only imagine in my dreams. I love that I have written prescriptions of foxglove derivatives for decades for patients who needed the rhythm-controlling properties of digitalis.

So here’s to nonsense, to words that are hard to say, and words that contain mysteries and fairytales within their letters, especially this particular word that actually spells out Love.

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As Good As Ever

One day, something very old
happened again. The green
came back to the branches,
settling like leafy birds
on the highest twigs;
the ground broke open
as dark as coffee beans.

The clouds took up their
positions in the deep stadium
of the sky, gloving the
bright orb of the sun
before they pitched it
over the horizon.

It was as good as ever:
the air was filled
with the scent of lilacs
and cherry blossoms

sounded their long
whistle down the track


It was some glad morning.
~Joyce Sutphen “Some Glad Morning”

Amazing that it happens yet again each May:

the ground yields up a rich
and blinding verdancy,
the air scented with perfumed bloom,
the clouds strewn and boiling over on the horizon.

It is enough to overwhelm and enchant us
into waking up early for another day,
just to see what lies in store.

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Born to Witness What I Can

(Laryx lyallis)

A few weeks after my mother died,
I dreamed that she was waiting for me
in a ravine of spring-green larches.
There was no worry in her eyes, and
she sat there with her knees drawn up,
content to be in the filtered sunlight.
Funny, because she never lived
among larch trees–my mom grew up
on an orange grove and raised us
in the Douglas fir. I do not live
among them either, apart from my rare
visits to the North Cascades. But when
I’m there, as now I am, sitting barefoot
on Cutthroat Pass among amber larches
bathing every bowl and basin,
I have a sense that she’s okay,
and that I am too, born to witness what
I can within this green and golden world
which still persists, with or without us,
but mostly with us, I’ve come to believe.
Things and people pass away–
but that’s when they become themselves.
There’s a new heaven, a new earth,
around and about us–and not much
different from the better parts of the old.
We don’t live there very often,
but when we do, eternity
ignites in a moment, light in the larches
that shines. And shines.

~Paul J. Willis “Sustainability” from Between Midnight and Dawn

We are promised all will be new.

When I imagine a new heaven and a new earth, I can only think of the moments in my life when eternity has been ignited momentarily – the light shining just so – when I realize what it will be like forever, not just for a moment.

Forever is more than I can fathom; we were put here to witness this green and golden world, while being loved by its infinite eternal Creator.

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. 
And there shall be no more death neither sorrow nor crying,
Neither shall there be any more pain,
For the former things are passed away. (Revelation 21:4)

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Clouds Gathering Around My Feet

Like animals moving daily
through the same open field,
it should be easier to distinguish
light from dark, fabrications

from memory, rain on a sliver
of grass from dew appearing
overnight. In these moments
of desperation, a sentence

serves as a halo, the moon
hidden so the stars eclipse
our daily becoming. You think
it should be easier to define

one’s path, but with the clouds
gathering around our feet,
there’s no sense in retracing
where we’ve been or where

your tired body will carry you.
Eventually the birds become
confused and inevitable. Even our
infinite knowledge of the forecast

might make us more vulnerable
than we would be in drawn-out
ignorance. To the sun
all weeds eventually rise up.
~Adam Clay “Our Daily Becoming”

I stroll among clouds surrounding my feet,
tiny puff balls that shatter and fall.

Watching the seeds scatter is a reminder
of the inevitable march of time,
for what will be no more, for what is sure to come

I’m given another day to get it right before I too blow away:
to be fruitful by rising up, my face to the sun, even in my weediness.

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Let’s Go Look Together

She sees a starling legs-up in the gutter.
She finds an earthworm limp and pale in a puddle.
What’s wrong with them? she says. I tell her they’re dead.

She scowls at me. She stares at her short shadow
And makes it dance in the road. She shakes its head.
Daddy, you don’t look pretty, she says. I agree.

She stomps on a sewer grid where the slow rain
Is vanishing. Do you want to go down there?
I tell her no. Neither do I she says.

She picks up a stone. This is an elephant.
Because it’s heavy, smooth, slate gray, and hers,
I tell her it’s very like an elephant.

We’re back. The starling is gone. Where did it go?
She says. I tell her I don’t know, maybe
A cat took it away. I think it’s lost.

I tell her I think so too. But can’t you find it?
I tell her I don’t think so. Let’s go look.
I show her my empty hands, and she takes one.

~David Wagoner “Walking around the Block with a Three-Year Old” from Traveling Light

These days, I spend most of my waking time walking and talking with a very special three year old. As he works in the barn with me, or just exploring the farm, he is helping me readjust how I look at the world, to see it the way he does and to try to figure out why things are the way they are. What seems logical to me doesn’t always make sense to him, so I need to put into words what I tend to take for granted.

Sometimes I just have to say I don’t know the answer to his question, because I really don’t know and I want him to believe in my truthfulness.

Whatever I say to him will get filed away in his memory banks for a lifetime, so I use careful words and respect his justifiable skepticism. I want to teach him to think through life’s puzzles without relying too much on outside opinions. What I hope is that even when I am empty of answers, he will always want to explore his questions while alongside me, trusting me as I hold his hand while we walk and talk together. I’m never empty when I am holding his hand.

I want him to remember that most of all.

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Raw Moist Dawn

I love these raw moist dawns with
a thousand birds you hear but can’t
quite see in the mist.

~Jim Harrison “Another Country”

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
~Georgia Douglas Johnson from 
The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems

In those raw moments before dawn
when a glow gently tints
the inside of the horizon’s eyelids,
the black of midnight waxes to merely shadow,
the worries of nighttime forgotten
amid a joyful chorus of unseen singers.

A gloaming dusk
fades into a gleaming dawn,
backlit silhouettes stark and still
as a drowsing world
slowly opens her eyes
and greets this new and glorious morn.

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