A Moon Accountability

Where were you
on the Night of the Purple Moon?
Contemplating the grooves on Sun Ra's platter?
Cuddling a duster and a dust jacket?
Or astride the middle of a road
petrified about the nearby intersection?

You dance to audience,
slow, undulating, interpretive phases,
rootstock with bustles and shells,
the rolled tobacco caps shaking like leaves,
and the sunlight that slanted through windows
beckons you outside to its darkening pastels.

I respond to these musics with webbed feet
and wings dipped in sweaty gossamer.
Around my neck the decorative spacers bouncing
off my chest are tiny spheres of glass
handed me in the starlight and the hidden
dark face that calls itself the moon.

Where were you going
this night of the eggplant,
eavesdropping noisy lovers forming
the shape of a child from scratch?
ersatz fertility in the opaque celestial eye
seeking the spacecraft of autocreation.

Seed to the conch shell,
face scanning the sky world
for the purple doorway, no stick crossing.
Hold aloft while dancing your rattles and feather fans,
the short cane the bandeliered southern gentlemen carry,
strutting their exploits inside the circle.

Hold aloft this dignity of night
whose stars effect stitched lazy in the mind;
and the moon moves among them,
the purple dragonfly of evenings
when we anticipate that lustrous sliver
and the new voice and song it brings.

Wrap this purple moon in shawls and dreams,
in hunters' coats and clan songs,
for emergence belongs to it.
The world of these nights is quohog mystery
closed around the fragile stone,
open to the wisdom of the stars.

Ron Welburn teaches American literatures at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His published works include Roanoke and Wampum: Topics in Native American Heritage and Literatures (2001), Council Decisions (1990), and Heartland: Selected Poems (1981).

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