moon map 2




Alain Gaymard
                                                                   

            moon map 2                 


by the sea of tranquility
i sat        & wept
for the pull of the tides
& the gravity of earth

by the sea of tranquility
i sat        bereft
no sound         but the breath
travelling from the mouthpiece
to the tank on my back


by the sea of tranquility
i sit        and reflect
on kaleidoscope colours


so far off       so far back


neb

 


       


Quoting my past self - does that count? I've got something on my mind, something needling - no, spreading through me like dark mercury, heavy and poisonous and strangely compelling. It's come after months of lockdown and confusion - who? what? where? why? - not to mention when? Will this ever be over? Thousands of businesses are closing. Many of us are or will have lost our living and our way of life. How many mothers and fathers wait in isolated care, longing for contact, for the smallest touch or embrace from one who knows and loves them? 

With an invisible threat, what new restrictions can we not expect? How will we know who to trust? If the Emperor has no clothes, who is his tailor, and why are we wearing hazmat suits? Is this a bad dream or a hallucination?

The usual people at the grocery store are now avoiding each other, doing their social distancing as prescribed, carefully following the arrows on the aisles, adjusting their masks and discreetly trying to get a breath of cool air. No one looks at me. No one returns my smile, or if they do, it's hard to tell with only half their face visible. The checkout girl says something but it's muffled, and I don't know how to respond, so I smile awkwardly. She might be smiling back, but I'm not sure.

One of many similar experiences.

(Perhaps there is not one, big, atomic Apocalypse, but many small ones, many mini armageddons, or accumulating ones - layered like the sediment in the wall of the Grand Canyon?)

I don't recognize this place. Did I go to sleep one night and wake up on the moon? I look around - where are the people? Where are the warm-blooded human beings who used to wrestle and fight and laugh and embrace? I hear distant screams, I see fire and flares, confusion, rioting - but I can't tell where it's coming from or what it means.

 Not in this sterile, pockmarked, black and white landscape. Have I been exiled? Somewhere, there must be living, thinking, loving human beings? Where is the gravity that once held me? 

I am not living in fear. I do have hope, but I will say - this is what has dawned on me - things are not going to go back to what they were. 


 It may be time to map the moon.

(I wrote the poem back in the 90's, I had no idea how true it would feel 20 years later. I had no idea I would look back so lovingly, so wistfully at the swirl of colours and life now unreachable, distant and past.)


 

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