Lunar: A History: For Don on our fiftieth anniversary

In Palomas the moon was Mexican silver washing the street, the tin music, our dancing.

In Dallas, moonlight was burning: 93 degrees at ten PM. Imagine—you had come all that way for this fire.

Outside Abilene, we said the summer moon was a neon Orange Crush sign, that much too-sweet, that awful bright.

Then in a wedding dark, East Texas June wore an opal cresset-light reflecting on our new pair of rings.

Manhattan’s moons were lost and lovely, light riffing among skyscrapers, diaphanous as a blues flute’s aside. Held in that melody we made a daughter.

Later the Roman moon was a weathered coin: and the Florentine—all hammered gold. The wet Dublin mood looked at the Liffey and the river shone.

And under a day-moon at Pete’s Canyon, Montana at sunny noon—hail inexplicably pocked the clearing with its white pebbles while the moon’s ghost hovered like a thumbprint of smoke.

Once we stood in a circle of headstones and old time in a swept cemetery in Shelby County, Texas, where custom gone remains—where neither blade nor leaf nor flower was—in that swept-sand moonscape in the middle of the woods, midnight’s crescent shining like a seashell lifted from a grave.

Remember how Greek moonlight turned to donkey song, a path of stones, and midnight Easter shouts? Poppies and a whitewashed wall. That oldest reflection wrought some change in us we carried home: the moon thereafter spoke in roses, in sea-silver, thyme-scent, salt, and a lemon wind.

Tonight the hunter’s moon on our backyard will touch this year with shine like memory that folds in reflected fire each smallest thing, giving back its meaning—this being one of the many changing names for love.