Moon
That was how I ended up with pages hanging up above the heater, above the open oven,
the stove was on, Goodnight Moon. Pasted up over the little wooden cutting board was ‘goodnight mush,’
and over the door was the old rabbit lady, who, whispering ‘hush,’ engages the first of the turns,
with importance and ease of appearance, towards this old place while her faith is transmuted to spacefulness.
And her faith, like mine as I leave in a cloudless blue morning, the threshold anointed,
then immediately open my phone, is such that the comb, and the brush, and the bowl full of mush,
all are grateful for having been bid goodnight, all for this reason alone will they keep to their promise
to appear, and in truth, to appear as they are, be nearer or far, used fondly, forgotten,
be sturdy, or toppled, passed through like a threshold or scrutinized. The window’s ajar as I go.
I don’t notice until I return how the page on the sill, or the first page, gets folded over itself
by the warmed winter air when it came: ‘there was a telephone’ and a copyright renewed, facing up, askew,
still fluttering. So the right thing to do is to flatten it under the little wood cutting board,
crush bulby cloves of garlic with my pocketknife, the blade of which is broad enough to pry
its preening skin with certain pressure points at its equator, like paper
peeling loose from the spine, partially dissolving at the table where I’d put it to the side
but not expected the speed at which would travel wine spilled, and now at the cusp of what once was supposed to be sleep
and the end of the meal, you suggest that we upend the table, fold up the blanket
that’s been serving so far as a rug, and lay out the pages to keep them from fusing.
I take your suggestion in pride, since you’re there, and the space that’s been formed,
or appeared, is a brightness: you already handle this place with a reverence.
With the book facing down, the final pages come out first, the ‘goodnight noises everywhere’
which, in the dampened heavy light, and it already having been the page which, inked most darkly,
kept its mood when flooded, its peeping and its glistening, gave us the most trouble:
is it the last address to the ‘noises everywhere’?—by this point the lady has gone—or is it a claim about the ‘goodnight noises’
which are everywhere? When playfulness begins and ends. When the surface of the waters of the deep is skin of trout.
When the floor becomes more holy than the table for sharing its wine, but only so far as we first
had denied it this. Only so far as it first had been widened, appears as we rummage and manage,
the ‘next thing’ already in view: it goes on the floor as we bring it and guide it
or importantly cut it. It goes on the Cherokee Phoenix laid out
like the floor of a woods on the floor. Page against page. Against paw, against trace
of a hare as he presses a path, like a printer or a fake tattoo of hearth and rocking chair
with wine instead of water, page against neck. The Phoenix comes twice in each month
since I’ve rented this room, it comes with the last tenants’ names and I’ve seen how month by month
the changes in their mailing address for the rest of their subscriptions come, but not for the Cherokee Phoenix.
I save them since I know that soon enough they’ll get to this one, and then the route will fold,
but for now, the ads for Tahlequah meat co., and for the Welcome Center in Vinita,
develop like a raft of squid and early-morning steam in which another, piecewise, raft
is being interlaced, and slow enough do we ourselves appear, as goodnight touches
in the ‘great green room.’ My ink-absorbing toeprints drunkenly step in,
a hair of yours corrals the ‘young mouse,’ and somehow what’s at stake is everything,
the possibility to even live in peace. I flick a coriander seed over your beautiful head and into the sink,
we eat the left flank of a Hudson steelhead trout who had lived. On the front page of the Phoenix
three cyclists visit a Trail of Tears marker in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and on the cusp
of the end of our meal, and when we should be saying grace, either you or I
spills dark, purple, wine and we forget to even ask why we have to live.
Once and a while. ‘Goodnight stars.’ Once and a while. ‘Goodnight air,’ or love, or a single root of a tree in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Who were we? Before the meal I knew. What does it mean to ask what the air means?
I knew and then I didn’t. Just before I cut the nerve, before the oil.
Visitation. Vicissitude. The only remnant of the answer was its shape
in your mouth when I asked, the turn of the fate in the room from your vicious commitment to changing.
How when the skin and wood begin to separate the air flinches, or how
I drain the cup a bit too fast. To realize you can always play
is an awesome danger. Because it makes the ‘green room’ great, to play in a place
and not in another. I think about how I haven’t thought about God in months when you hang up that first page,
all purple and glutinous. The stakes were huge because we will change swiftly and masterfully
when we remember to remember this. Not a memory but visitation, a widening as lucid as an email
to the Phoenix, or wiping oil on my pants a couple times when the towel hides under the pan,
not minding but using, finding and brandishing, rough and steady matrices of promises
that let me scramble up on the stove, or carefully push with my feet all the bowls on the counter to safety,
and only then I discover my hands on the top of the uppermost cupboard are coated
in a mixture of ashes and what smells like tomato juice. I only barely make this out
before I finish stringing up ‘the cow jumping over the moon,’ before you let go of the other end
of the string hanging across the diagonal of the ceiling. What, at that point, were we feeling?
That what glowed and glowed and glowed could just stop like that, in order to become
something glowing. To change into another person. I folded up the pocketknife
after scraping my hands with the back of the blade. That was how we started being old,
we lived by being worlds, we lived for a while like that,
while whispering “hush” and visiting things in their turns by bringing them near to appear as a covenant:
when I picked out the pound of steelhead trout’s body, the man wrapped it in a layer of wax paper. Thank you trout’s body.
Neither is the paper nothing: Thank you wax paper. Thank you Hudson. Thank you Tahlequah.
Thank you little wooden cutting board and thank you open oven.
That morning on the sidewalk, I found an olive mug with a brown handle, with “nourish the soul” written on the bottom along with the Yiddish word for laughter. Thank you laughter.