More about the moon
While I was writing the poem Riding in the Car With My Boyfriend, in Missouri in 2009, I fell into a sort of thrall with the mirror-like quality of the moon. That white circle hanging up there could be anything…whatever we see in it, obligingly it allows. For months then I was filling up with moon poems, emptying them out on paper, filling up again. I got the idea to do a book of them. Then, going back through my archives, i discovered moons in many poems from teenage-time on. So I’ve brought them all together – any poem I ever wrote in which the moon is mentioned somewhere.
The moon is of course the quintessential poem-object. It is also hara-like; empty and charged with power at once. The Buddha was born, became enlightened, and left his body at the May full moon. Meditators have used the full moon’s mysterious assistance for thousands, perhaps millions, of years. And Osho’s birth name, Rajneesh, means Lord of the Full Moon.
The book is one hundred and ten pages and contains fifty-seven poems and a few drawings. Many of the poems are prefaced by an explanatory sentence or two, to make them more accessible. And the book is divided into sections, as my life seems to me to have been: Teenage Time, Poona One, The Ranch, Poona Two, and so on.
