ELEGY FOR THE MOON

   It was like there was a new source of gravity. Like the sun had grown twice as big over night and pulled things away from the other bodies. It pulled her away from her earth.

           She looked back at our earth.

           Goodbye.

           She looked back at our earth at the pigeons gathering on patches of roofing covered in pigeon shit. At the puddles with exotic swirling colors. She looked at a bus stopping. An old woman crouched at a window might have been saying farewell to her as she floated off. She made some kind of desperate gesticulation at the woman at the window and then the old woman dropped the blind at the window and walked back over to the couch for some television.

           As she was pulled and pulled up higher, she looked down at the shape and distribution of the city blocks. The combined symbol made by the street intersections perfectly echoed the personal scrawl in her journals. The mosaic of roof colors and roof shapes articulated her ancient moods. What creations are not metaphor to her dreams? A reverberation of her pursuing loves?

           Thank you for your arrangement, I see it, but I have to go.

           She ripped through the wing of an airplane.

           She tried to bring the cloud-shapes with her, clawed at the puffs which she loved, the way they were always making a joking reference to time before time caught up to them.

           Such good, pure clouds. Such dedicated and exuberant clouds. So happily pacing the time of the universe. Where I’m going there won’t be clouds.

           She spun and spun and her tear-streams formed a double helix.

           She sent the loudest, biggest, farthest, longest prayer she could and her heart swelled and swelled like the moment of sunrise. Live your dreams tomorrow morning. No not the ambitions, when I grow ups, but the landscape and character of your dreaming consciousness. Live the family of lions lounging in the basement of the abandoned mansion on the cliff near the pacific ocean that crashes on rocks 10,000 feet below. Live the terror of nudity in public in department stores and airports. Live the waters crowded with turtles and whales. Live in the subway with infinity terminals. Live out the shape and color-mood that surrounds your pupil and let your walking mark the line-work of an angel’s drawing. Run like a manta ray. Feel thrown ahead of your deliberations, like your sex has overridden all your plans, like you’re in mid migration already, like you woke up among the wildebeests, your consciousness belonging to several of the 2,000 crossing the Serengeti. Feel in your long hair the parallel statement of creeks, all the creeks, happily moving through little chasms in the grasses and woods. Feel the rain on your hair like it is a creek, and it will swell swell swell and the muddy banks will be carried away with your growing, and the fish will eat well today, and tonight when the sky is blacker than ever, blacker than ever, black forever, and the stars brighter without me, remember your possibility of rainy distribution, remember I taught you to be the drops that make creeks ocean-bound that are cloud-bound that are mountain-top-bound over and over again.

           And suddenly the atmosphere holding her together became too thin to contain her and her body divided into a million different drifting-away pieces and from a few feet away she looked like a replica of a galactic phenomenon which would have no witness and no record.

by Tom Carlson