LUNA, LUNA
- My mother taught me about God so my father taught me about space, about cosmos, about how I could go to the moon. She never said much about devotion, unless you count saying you must believe in things you can’t see every Sunday when we asked why we had to sit in pews. Meanwhile, my father quoted Tom Hanks movies and bought me picture books from NASA. He watched me as I pressed my palms against aluminum in the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
- Maggie Nelson: Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with the moon. Or perhaps the whole solar system, not just our planet but the whole goddamn thing, this vacuum people think about but all the while forget, so self-absorbed in everydays. I wonder how the human race exists as a smallness, lost in the universe while the moon keeps turning like a great, gray clock.
- Carl Sagan calls us a pale blue dot. Is this how the moon sees us? A small marble in the middle of the smooth, black laminate counter lodged between the wooden slats of Pottery Barn tables? That's here. That's home. That's us.
- There are different colors of this moon: my favorite is red. Called a blood moon, you can taste it like you taste your gums after flossing. Harvest moon is orange, and winter solstice is snow. I wonder, if it could be any colour you like—
- In July, we drive through Martian canyons and talk about how we are stardust, wondering where we go when we disappear into the desert, who will trade our boxed sweaters for rum and cokes. September comes, back in the city, and we stand on wrought fire escapes and imagine lunar mare, later tie the laces of our moon shoes against the street curb below. Back in August and everything after, sun and moon met in the middle for a moment or two. The moon, scorched by the sun, pride hurt, disappears into the blue. If that is what it looks like to burn in hell, then maybe we don't want to see it. Maybe when it freezes over we won't have worry: we'll end up stuck together in Satan’s icebox between the toaster waffles and the frozen lasagna.
- John Kessler’s “American Landscape” depicts a rollercoaster seen at a distance at dusk. This is what cities look like, from planes, and I wonder what they look like from planets. I think there is a photo, from the satellite, that shows just this, tiny pinpricks of light all over Earth. They are floating in black, but they, too, might as well be in a wooden box, a plexus-glass case. In its absence of any human figure, American Landscape, in particular suggests a consumerist wasteland. If the American dream promises prosperity and self-determination, Kessler’s roller coaster suggests a more fraught experience of highs, lows, and sharp turns.
- Have you ever driven on a black highway, and as you are driving, you realize you—theonly car on the road—are driving somewhere north to Rochester or somewhere west to Zanesville, guided by nothing but your high beam? Your heart, thumping soundly in your chest, suddenly in your throat.You feel it in your neck as you watch for the eyes of deer, the eyes ofbabies watching television. Pupils dilated bysudden bursts of light.
- Shoot for the moon, they say; even if you miss, you can still work at the Dairy Queen.
- I once drew myself as an astronaut, skinny legs and brown hair with a big white coat and bigger white boots. I stood next to a Lego spaceship, down the street from my Lincoln Log house, my driveway paved with cardboard bricks. I don’t know when I decided I wouldn’t be an astronaut, and part of me wishes I remembered giving up dreams like I remember giving up chocolate for Lent. Especially now that I don’t even believe in God.
- Moonchild describes children born under Cancer, the astrological sign from June 21 to July 22 to avoid negative associations of the word. I guess this means to avoid connotations with children born with cancer, something just as big as space and just as hard to understand. I am no moonchild but I was named after one, the real kind, during a time in my mother’s life I like to call “on taking care of babies.”
- She was a nurses' aid before she was a nurse herself, not long after she took her exams, and not so long before she had me. At twenty-one, with a ring on her finger, she awaited a wedding until she finished school. There are few pictures from this time but she had long blonde hair pulled back in bandanas and banana clips and wore navy blue scrubs with wide linen pockets. Her scrubs ended up in the basket of Halloween clothes under the stairs: her career became a costume and mothering her full-time job.
The box of Christmas photos tells me she wore the purple dress with mauve lipstick and likely planned to return a Crock-Pot to Macy’s when she received two from the registry. As she sipped water from the water fountain, she gossiped about the dress she would wear and what hor d'oeuvres to serve at the reception. The nurses always asked for Jodi.
Leukemia is a big word for two babies who are too little, six months old with sick blood and more bracelets than months lived on Earth. The parents were kind, but both work ed hard jobs: a mother and father who had two healthy babies until they had none and a three-year-old son who had two sick sisters and misseddays at preschool to sit in a waiting room and eat ice cream from a paper cup with a sour-tasting wooden spoon. She said they were good parents tired of working and tired of hospital visits and tired of trying not to be tired for a son who was three and wasn’t sick. My mother said she loved the names of both babies, but one rhymed with her soon-to-be-last- name, and she liked the other one just the same, and held onto it for a long, long while. She moved around as a float, but kept coming back to the babies, because the nurses kept asking for Jodi until one day she moved to another floor and didn’t come back for some time. She doesn’t remember when she last held them or if they were discharged or if o ne got better while the other got worse. She asked later what happened, and the RN shook her head slightly as she filled out forms for pain prescription. This is how my mother took care of babies until she didn’t anymore, and how she named me after someo ne I never met. She wondered if naming a healthy baby after one who was sick was too sad, and considered cycling through baby names like the names of moons. She settled that the naming honored her time on Earth, even if short. I live with a driver ’s licens e and paychecks with a borrowed name, but if I am to be named after someone, I’m glad it was her.
- A five year old asks astronaut Chris Hadfield, if the satellite is lonely and he says no, the Voyager is bravest of them all. He says, You wouldn’t want to spend your whole life hiding under your bed . He pats her on her small head and talks more of taking life in her small hands and trying not to fear.
- Joshua Jennifer Espinoza: the moon eats itself while the sun watches.The sickle-shape folds like a sinking piece of cherry pie or an unmade bedspread in morning. We iron our clothes against the coffee table while the moon dies, straightening our collars and our wrinkles in time while we watch the microwave clock reheat cold pizza. We collect coins for the Laundromat slots, shove them into silver slivers and jam our thumbs against cold space metal.
- The sun and the moon are in love, but they never get to see each other. This is wrong, of course. There is that one blinding moment Annie Dillard says is like dying. She talks of lying in bed and platinum grass, and says, What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know. It is especially different for those of us whose grasp of astronomy is so frail that, given a flashlight, a grapefruit, two oranges, and 15 years, we still could not figure out which way to set the clocks for daylight saving time. She says the sky turns indigo and the moon is just a piece of sky, sliding over like a shutter while from all the hills came screams.
The story: the sun loved the moon so much he died every night just to let her breathe. Bullshit. What if it’s the other way around?
- We talk of no God and no golden gates and how we are made of stardust. Madeleine L’Engle: People are more than just the way they look. I think it funny how strange humans are, how we can tear one another into smaller pieces but cheer for strangers at a marathon and stand on black roadsides with hand-painted signs.
- We have one and Mars has two and I guess we have to share with Venus and Mercury who have none. Jupiter has 67, Saturn 62, Uranus 27, Neptune 14. And also Pluto, master of the underworld. They all have names, but we just call ours Moon. I like the way names like Leda and Elara sound, the L sound wet to the lip. There is Phoebe, there is Helene. Then Phoebe of the Argonauts, and Helene of Troy. Hydra, one of the nine-headed serpents. Nix, the goddess of darkness and night, mother of Charon, ferryman of Hades. Oberon, of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, and Kalamazoo draft beer. Miranda and Caliban, of The Tempest. Juliet, for tragedy. Pan, god of shepherds, keeps us in flocks.
Pandora—I first heard of her in one mythic sentence: she opened the box and let all the evil out into the world. Not many know the box was mistranslated. The box is rather a jar, perhaps like those we use to seal black and ripe jam. Today the phrase ‘to open Pandora’s box’ means to perform an action that may seem small or innocent, but that turns out to have severely detrimental and far-reaching negative consequences. She is a kind of theodicy, an attempt to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil.
- Videos of spaceships taking off look like when you are in a carwash. You can’t see anything in front or behind when soap takes over and you can only hear. You feel naked. The dark side is another great thumping, cranking, a great wielding of song and laughter on tracks. And then screaming.
In college, my father’s roommate’s mother almost travelled on the Challenger. Instead, she sat at home cooking bacon strips on a skillet and watching TV as her colleague disappeared into morning. They both had classrooms of children, all of whom watched all 73 seconds. Her son, saved from orphan-hood, watched from his dorm room. He became a fighter pilot in the Navy.
- A Rutgers professor said, ten years from now, the moon would just be another airport. He isn’t around to see the runway they are building. But I think we have a long way to go, because people have their feet stuck on the sidewalk and never seem to look up. What happens when the sidewalk ends, and we’ve run out of road and the moon is closed for renovation? What do we do, where do we go, when we’ve used up our earths? Politicians have always promised the moon, but in the past no one believed them. The first spaceman to orbit the earth was the man in the moon. In the past, the moon was just an inspiration to lovers and pets; in the future it will be just another airport. It wasn’t until life on earth became too dangerous that men began to fly to the moon. As time passes it becomes easier to get to the moon while it becomes harder to stay on the earth. Later he says, The man in the moon is a distant creature who is probably wondering why everyone has suddenly become so anxious to visit him.
- In Mesopotamian mythology, of Babylonia, the god of the moon is called Sin. I think people are afraid to row into space like it is a large, deep lake in case they end up bumping into Charon on the dark side of the moon. At least they’ll have money in their pockets, flat disks that leave ridges when you press them into thumbs.
- Edgar Arcenaux used a slide projector perched on concrete blocks to show his piece he called “Block Out the Sun.” He wields his hand, weapon-like, and covers the bright light with his fist. The gesture is a reference to the works of astronomers, who judged whether a given day would be good for solar observation by blocking the sun in order to measure the clarity of the atmosphere. Further, the cycle of the artist’s slide carousel echoes the rotation of our planet around the sun. In other images, the artist’s gesture evokes some-thing more spiritual, almost cosmic: the hand of a divine being as a means of conjuring darkness or sparking creation. What remains constant in Arcenaux’s piece is a poetic reference to the human condition and the idea of the individual confronting something unknown and larger than the self.
- In the end, the moon absorbs the Missouri blue like a wet sponge and eats itself up like it’s a wedge of angel food cake served on a round platter. What if instead of ‘I love you’ we said ‘angel food cake’ because it’s also three words strung together and, when said often enough,shouldn’t make a difference. We can mutter it softly as we wander the earth like wild things, perm-pressing t-shirts and listing planets. You could argue the moon wins in the great day-dusk duel, when it shines beacon- like in the black night, but I don’t think it does. It has no light of its own, only bears the reflection of the shining sun.
- Goodnight, moon.
- We ran as if to meet the moon—Robert Frost. I wonder if we walked. I wonder if we split the moon like we split appetizers into pieces to serve on plastic trays.
- Maybe there’s a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, says Stephen King,and the stars laugh in cold voices. We, all bags of bones, exist in his world where there is a wrong ness in the mundane everyday on Earth.
- We only ever see one side. We are stuck in orbit. Every one is a moon, says Mark Twain, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
- Settle, not yet, says Sagan. Don’t stop. He speaks of other airports, other earths.
- One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. I couldn’t write this without including that. Would I be American? Wasn’t that thepoint, to stick our flag into puttied dust for all to see? To remember when we were weightless? I remember askingwhat will happen to the flag andI think now that it is eerie, that it will be there for the rest of time. Our shadows are darker up there, amongst the crater crooks. JFK: We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
- I wonder if we could wear liquid space metal as a cape and shroud ourselves in galactic questions, as Barbara Chase-Riboud achieved in her bronze sculpture inspired by Cleopatra called, Le Manteau. Drawing from her travels, her work reflects on history, identity, and a sense of place... Despite the material’s weight and density, the sculpture drapes softly onto the floor, evoking power and grace, solidity and fluidity. Along with diasporic beauty, it manifests a quiet evocation of the unknown. What I mean to say is this is gravity, this quiet, stabilizing weight.
- The human condition has been pondered and analyzed from many perspectives, including those of religion, philosophy, history, art literature, anthropology, psychology, and biology. In literature, the human condition is typically used in the context of ambiguous subjects such as the meaning of life or moral concerns. In space, a human’s condition deteriorates. It disintegrates slowly and blackens as the moon does, unable to survive without light. That’s why the astronauts are always moving, always monitored by doctors back on earth. On Earth, each time we move, gravity provides resistance to the muscles and bones of our body. Without gravity, without resistance, astronauts’ bones would be more fragile and their muscles weaker after time spent in space. It begins by a change in the normal balance between protein synthesis and protein degradation. This is called muscle atrophy or when muscles waste away.
- The moon is made from many of the same things that we find here on Earth. So this is how she controls oceans. This is how I wonder of existence:
I found out today some people believe the moon is a chunk of earth which broke off like a bar of chocolate when an asteroid hit us. Maybe it’s true, maybe a piece of us is out there, bleak, and we are stuck in its endless apogee, circling what we broke without noticing and staring through telescopes at this piece of ourselves we lost and can never, ever get back.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There Should Be Flowers: Joshua Jennifer Espizona
Goodnight Moon: Margaret Wise Brown
Pale Blue Dot: Carl Sagan
Bluets: Maggie Nelson
Argonauts: Maggie Nelson
A Wrinkle in Time: Madeleine L’Engle
The Dark Side of the Moon, multiple songs: Pink Floyd
The Deep, Moon Woman & other paintings: Jackson Pollack
Where the Sidewalk Ends: Shel Silverstein
American Landscape: John Kessler
Cover the Sun: Edgar Arcenaux
Cape or Le Manteau: Barbara Chase-Riboud
Now This: Is Voyager Lonely?: Chris Hadfield, NPR
We Chose to Go to the Moon: John F. Kennedy
20,000 Quips & Quotes: Emmanuel Mesthene
Quote: Mark Twain
PANDORA’S BOX
Best Westerns
It is dark outside the shuttered motel windows and we close the blinds on the gravel parking lot. I line the dresser shelf with throwaway contact lenses and they shrivel up and snap like cheap plastic spoons stuck in garbage disposals or stolen from a Taco Bell.
Later, we sit at ugly first floor dining chairs stabbing jam packets with plastic knives, remembering when we were small enough to stack them up instead of peel their wrappers.
In the car, we said we won’t have children, answered with “you’re too young to know”, sowe asked to turn up the radio and paint our toenails baby pink against the windows.
Now, we pour thin batter in the waffle iron and soon smell it burn. We always forget to spray the skillet. The 1998 television says it will snow this afternoon. We are pleased we filled the car three exits back. Once, there was a white tarp draped over an Exxon sign like a corpse sheet in a capitalist morgue. It, nameless otherwise, reads FUEL.
We the animals, we rip the fat off bacon with our sharp teeth. We do not notice the spilled cereal milk that seeps into the carpet but we notice our palms still smell like gasoline as we press them to our cheeks.
Arizona
We pull into Page thinking it will be the Garden, but it’s rather hellish instead. It is many, many strip malls, and many, many gas stations, nowhere near the packed, uniformed beauty of Sedona. Sedona paints her McDonald’s signs seafoam in the middle of the desert. She chooses bubblegum Jeeps.
We drive by “Church Row” and we count twelve. I think of being small and learning the priest often smoked nicotine creeds on the back steps of the rectory while volunteers sprayed the pews with Lysol. I’m sure he hacked holy phlegm into the ashtray next to a manger with the baby Jesus.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. First Southern Baptist Church. St. David’s Episcopal. Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic. Shepard of the Desert. Their checkerboard floors chipped as front teeth.
Once, on a cruise, the waitress told us about her six-year-old little girl, and everyone smiled and laughed but no one bothered to think about how she never saw her, because she was trapped in a kitchen on a floating Eden while everyone else ate lunch.
Georgia O’Keeffe once said that every moment of her life she was terrified, but she kept going. We are given cold cans of lemonade from a wide white cooler on the river raft, and the canyons she painted loom high above.
Missouri Blue
We roll up like pill bugs and squeeze ourselves into the round steel cage, and it hoists us to the tip-top of the Gateway Arch on cable wires. We peer out over the window lip at the river below. We revisit the house where I was born and we watch our parents wonder who sits beyond the blue painted door at the dining room table with two cheap chairs after ten whole years.
By now, I’ve seen the Spirit of St. Louis—a small gray plane hanging from the ceiling like carcass in a butcher shop, a cable noose around her slender neck—in the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. I’ve visited at Christmastime. Her pilot, Charles Lindbergh, was the first person to fly across the Atlantic in 1927.
I think back to when I loved the story of Lindbergh, when I was very young and very small and he was very handsome and very dashing in the picture book and he had flown a plane across the ocean from my hometown and met the president.
I want to thank him, because I didn’t know you could do something good but be a bad person, or, on the other hand, be a good person but do something bad. I suppose that we all have to grow up some day, and I wonder if he used to build paper airplanes and had models strung from the ceiling with a spool of fishing line.
Martyr Children & Sleeping Bears
The dunes are big and we are small but we struggle to the top in our oversized sweaters. We stand on the hilltop like martyrs, and love that this looks like an ocean but smells like a lake. It’s fresh. It doesn’t sting our eyes, or make us lick our hands like dogs as we tumble through the sand. We—little children of God ordevilish children—like kings on a hot grainy carpet.
Gun Lake got its name when the Pottawatami Indians dropped their weapons in the water after declaring no more fighting, letting them sink to the black bottom. Meanwhile, Lake Michigan got its name from bears. The Legend of the Sleeping Bear tells a tale of a great forest fire that drove a mother bear and her two cubs to the shore, and they tried to swim across. The cubs, black as night, were soon lost in the dark. Their mother waited on the opposite shore, and was soon buried by sand and then snow. When the moon sank and the sun rose, her two cubs burst from the sea and became the Manitou Islands. The shoreline, shaped like their mother’s head resting on her paws, watches over.
I wonder how long you’re supposed to wait for someone to come back, when you know they never will. My parent’s parents come from Michigan and I think about legends the way my mother used to think about God; her greatest love before she met my father, and even after she took usto a priest with a feasting for tobacco.
“Walking in Memphis” & Other Cassette Songs
Here stands a house—built of Lincoln logs and miniature teacups—where the furniture is so buffed in the sitting room we can see oaked reflections in the wooden china cabinet. We fold our socked feet under us like birds to keep them off white carpet.
The house smells like pie and warm bread and hot supper and they double lock all the doors even though there is no crime. The neighbors bring comfort food that tastes like rubber and we fill up our mouths, wiping our fingers on thick cloth napkins.
I wonder if the Devil picks up his dress shirts from the Laundromat, fixes the hole in Adam’s shirt and combs Eve’s hair. I wonder if the Devil stands on his porch, tossing buckets of water onto the front yard to keep the flames at bay. I wonder if the Devil has a son, let’s say five years old, who he drives to school and drops off a block away, so the other children don’t stare. I wonder if the Devil prefers Marlboro reds to a pack of Camels, or if he doesn’t smoke because he’s already burned out.
Tennis shoes aren’t always white: a pair in the hallway, a pair by the backdoor, a pair by the gym bag, and a pair in the garage, grass stained green. Every house, unlike this house, does not need a cross hanging over the doorframe or the mantelpiece or the washer and dryer with a basket of folded sheets.
Gun Lake
Until recently, an old photograph sat on the mantle at the Bay Point Inn, a black and white print of the dining hall complete with a rickety railing and stone steps. The steps now have fresh concrete and new brick. The photo sat propped against an empty wine bottle for a few years until the hostess moved it to the women’s restroom and nailed it above the doorway in a plastic frame. About two years ago, it was replaced by a watercolor swordfish.
The grocery store is around the bend, where they specialize in Fourth of July sparklers, oversized boxed cereals, and malt liquor. We hold the pocket change we are given, clenched tight in our small fists, and are told one day, when we’re older, we’ll need those for laundry at the Laundromat. Supposedly, Al Capone of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, slick with liquor, hid from the Chicago police in a cottage up on the hill. Back at the house, in the basement, the 1980s photographs boast old sweaters but the same bottles of beer.
We squabble outside, cabbage patch children, and help clean before company comes. We pretend to help to fold the laundry but wrap ourselves in hot towels from the dryer instead, while the adults scrub the countertops and claw the hair out of the shower drain. Our grandmother tells us stories of her children and her siblings and how one time, when she drove through Nebraska, the sky was black with birds and they looked like death waiting in the evening light.
“The End”
My mother swears—her hand to God—she met Jerry Seinfeld and Ralph Lauren while walking on South Elmwood Avenue on her way to get coffee and she still talks about it to this day while she’s folding laundry. Apparently, Ralph was driving, Jerry riding shotgun, one hand on the radio and the other resting on the edge of his seat, his New York mouth spitting out jokes like an engine. A bad actor, but he makes people laugh.
There are supposedly no chains here, not one, but there stands a 7-Eleven like a raw wound on the gravel road, flashing OPEN sign in the front window. They sell 99 cent coffee, bulk packs of cigarettes, and boxed candy.
I think of how I am obsessed with collecting key cards like our mother used to collect teeth, the ones you get from grocery stores and gas stations and libraries. She kept the cards on her key ring and they made a nice noise when she dropped them on the counter, settling between the phone bills, elementary newsletters and
bunches of bruised fruit.
There’s an old article, printed and framed in the museum at the Montauk Pointe Lighthouse, about a woman who noticed the beacon would soon tumble off the eroding cliff and out to sea. No one believed her, so she saved it herself, and then the same people who didn’t believe her hung up her picture for the whole world to see.
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
August and Everything After: Counting Crows
Carnegie Museum of Art
Online definition entry of "Moonchild"
Now This: Is Voyager Lonely?: Chis Hadfield, NPR
Eclipse: Annie Dillard
Online definition entries of "Pandora" and "Theodicy"
Quote, Emmanuel Mesthene & Where the Sidewalk Ends: Shel Silverstein
Blocking Out the Sun: Edgar Arcenaux, Carnegie Museum of Art
Quote: Robert Frost
Quote: Stephen King
Cape of Le Monteau, Barbara Chase-Riboud: Carnegie Museum of Art
Online definition entry of "Human Condition"
Online definition entry of "Moon"