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Charlotte Innes
More Moon than Moon (I)
Moon turtle, swimming across Black Lack Lake,
your slow crawl is my measure—dark belly
a steady weight for shape-shifting silver,
diminishing as your shell grows, fattening
as the shell grows weak. Three days and nights
you’re gone. But you always crawl back, on time,
uneclipsed, old plodding one, to your night beat.
More Moon than Moon (J)
The moon’s not cool tonight,
there’s a sort of red haze,
an aureole, too sun-like—
like he might choke.
He? I thought the moon
was a she—at least sometimes.
Think how boring it is,
to cycle across the sky,
night after night after night.
Maybe the moon wants to play
identity games...
I resent this use of the moon
as a metaphor for human frailty.
The moon is straight-up
the moon, a rock...
...but sun-lit, beautiful!
How lovely that the lives of the moon
and the sun are so intertwined...
These bloggers do go on!
For the real scoop—my bio,
my books, my numerous articles,
interviews, poetry, info.
about the number of times
the word moon occurs
in Shakespeare, Homer and such,
the etymology of moonstruck,
mooncalf, moonshine, links
to alcoholic astronomers
anonymous, Moon in June
my new dating line—
check out (at no cost)
my lunar website
themoonrules.com
fact-filled, up-to-the-minute
absolutely true, and
of course, life-changing.
More Moon than Moon (K)
This is the book of dark:
A cradle rocking shadow.
A white bowl and brew.
A broken egg and foam.
A blank eyeball, blinded.
The bitten-nipple moon.
More Moon than Moon (L)
The full moon over Moab
almost engulfed us. So
we headed south, dogged
by storm-heavy skies,
where trees, like faded-yellow
fans, brilliant with frost,
went in and out of light.
We climbed towards rock
cities, red, striated,
block on block, amid rubble.
Fingers of rock accused
or seemed locked in desire.
Oh we were sturdy as juniper,
clung like saxifrage
on cliffs to a thing as delicate
as yesterday’s leaf shadows.
Though the moon pursued with snow,
with osiers bent back under drifts
like the hair of drowned girls—
by three young trees, grey
like kings wise from birth,
we put hollow-stemmed
green papyrus in our pockets
where they leaked water, like ink.
Writer's Statement
Perhaps because I came late to poetry after a long career in
journalism, I sometimes feel, like Mark Strand, that "Ink runs from
the corners of my mouth/There is no happiness like mine./I have been
eating poetry." Poetry as necessary as eating or breathing. Poetry
as joy. And poetry as "joy in the bookish dark," as Strand puts it.
When I was a child I was always reading. But I also wanted to be an
Antarctic explorer. And there's a sense in which poetry has taken me
to that exciting, icy place. I believe that's what led me to the
writing of my series "More Moon than Moon." Lying awake at 2 a.m.
some months ago, with the full moon shining through my bedroom
window, I tried to grasp an idea I only half understood, in language
and substance, a sense of darkness and joy. So now I have written 26
poems with the moon as a sort of focal point, the known shore of the
poems, from which I set off to discover a new way of looking at the
world. My voice in these poems is different from the voice in most
of my earlier poems--often dark, often ironic, sometimes comic. It's
been a bit like learning how to say things in a new language. I also
found I needed to catalog each poem (A-Z) like an explorer listing
new discoveries.
Charlotte
Innes writes about books and the arts for many publications,
including the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The New York Times.
Her poetry has appeared in The Hudson Review and will next appear in
The Eleventh Muse. She has taught journalism at the University of
Southern California and Columbia University, New York. Currently,
she teaches journalism and creative writing at Brentwood School, Los
Angeles. Her awards include a first prize in the Poetry in the
Windows V contest and a National Press Club award for consumer
journalism. Her essay on Chinese writer Can Xue appears as the
foreword to "Old Floating Cloud" by Can Xue (Northwestern University
Press). Her Nation essays on writers Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo
Ishiguro, Elfriede Jelinek, and Yann Martel are anthologized in
Contemporary Literary Criticism (Vols. 64, 110, 169, 192).
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