I can't sleep…
Here are five (5) separate poems from Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser that all reference the Moon. All beautiful. All made me think. My favorite: No. 4.
No. 1:
A welcome mat of moonlight
on the floor.
Wipe your feet before getting into bed.
No. 2:
The moon put her hand
over my mouth and told me
to shut up and watch.
No. 3:
A house will turn itself
to catch a little moonlight
on a bedpost.
And so I ask Helen my favorite question: “If you could have one sense back, which would it be?” Her fingers go round and round in circles, and I can feel the girl actually thinking in my palm.
“Which do you pick?” she asks.
Though I have been deprived of all senses save touch since the age of two, while she is only deaf and blind, for me the choice is simple. “Sight,” I tell her, all the glorious colors God has painted on lands and faces. Green is the color I remember with the most pleasure: green from the grass outside our house in New Hampshire. Blue still spills from that square of sky visible over the bed where I lay ill for almost a year, and Mama says my eyes were bright blue before they shrunk behind my lids. Red I have a strong and disagreeable sense of, from when they bled me with leeches. And black, black I know the longest and best because it is my constant companion. These are the only colors I can recall or imagine with any clarity.
~ Kimberly Elkins, What Is Visible, A Novel
This is an excerpt is from a novel about Laura Bridgman (1829-1889). Laura Bridgman’s family was struck with scarlet fever when Laura was two years old. The illness killed her two older sisters and left her deaf, blind, and without a sense of smell or taste. She is known as the first deaf-blind American to gain a significant education in the English language, fifty years before the more famous Helen Keller.
Photography: Media.photobucket via Your Eyes Blaze Out
It was curious to think
that the sky was the same for everyone.
The ground beneath their feet may be different
But the sky remains the same
The sun, the stars, and the people under the sky
were also very much the same
everywhere,
all over the word
hundreds or thousands or maybe millions of people
just like this…
wel·kin [wel-kin], n, the sky; the vault of heaven.
“The enchantment of the sky, ever changing beauty almost ignored. Beyond words, without fixed form, not to be understood, or stated. It ravished away dullness, worry, even pain. It graces life when nothing else does. It is the first marvel of the day. Even when leaden grey it is still a friend, withdrawn for a time.”
~ Florida Scott-Maxwell, Measure of My Days
Image Credit: Natgeo
INTERVIEWER:
There’s a sense of great space in your poems. Would you trace that to growing up in Kansas?
STAFFORD:
I sometimes have thought about that, yes. In our world at least half of the world was sky; that is the way I’ve sometimes phrased it to myself. I mean, there’s the land, but it isn’t as big as the sky. Someone told me a wonderful story about a woman who came out from Nebraska and wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. The motel person said, Yes, you can see it if you walk down to the end of the road. This visitor stood there a few moments on the beach, and then walked back, and the motel person said, What do you think of it? And she said, Well, it’s all right, but I can’t help but think it isn’t as big as I thought it would be. This was the Pacific Ocean! Well, she was from Nebraska, I know about that. That’s the biggest thing there is—the sky! It’s there, and it’s an abiding puzzle, presence, and invitation.
—William Stafford, from “The Art of Poetry No. 67,” The Paris Review (Winter 1993, No. 129)
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