Moonbane

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Had you a single cold breath above?

What word would it be?

Would it be Love?

~ * ~

I’ve never been happy with the last line of that poem. I wrote it after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in the summer of 1969, when the scientists and newspapermen started saying the Moon had been conquered and was a dead place, not interesting anymore. I walked out late one night during that same summer, and looked up and saw the Man in the Moon, and I asked him if he really was dead and buried. He gazed down at me, silver-white, inscrutable, and I went in and wrote a poem that I called “The Secret.”

I thought it was a pretty good poem, but I had some trouble with the last lines—partly because, despite the effect that moonlight is supposed to have on lovers, I did not feel love emanating from it that night. I felt something else, something disquieting almost.

I wrestled with the last lines of my poem that night, the way poets are supposed to, but finally I gave up and left them like they were and went out and looked at the Man in the Moon again. He was high overhead, staring balefully down at me. Only now he didn’t look like a man at all, but like some other animal, one I had seen and could almost recognize—

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