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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

BLUE MOON

New Year's Eve, and we aren't celebrating. I'm already garbed for bed. But outside the moon is rising, the "blue moon," and of course I have to go out in my bedclothes to see it, along with my digital camera, although I'm no good as yet in taking night photos.

Fog everywhere. Inside it, the lineaments of the trees beside our house fascinate me. I wish I could paint them. Instead I snap a not very good photo.

Then I find her, Mistress Blue Moon, hiding behind a tall pine.


Blue Moon



Why so blue,

the fog swirled

around you

atop the tree?


I try to snare

you with shutter

clicks, New Year’s

Eve having gone

to my head,


bubbles bursting

around me

as I roam

the backyard

in muddy scuffs


and gray nubby

bathrobe (on which

my dog sleeps

every night).


Why so blue,

I ask myself

looking up at you,

oh you moon


turning fog

into gauze into

silk into spider’s

web (choose


one) I'm trolling

through

as if I don't

want to go back

inside to the light


of a room

where I know

every shadow that

waits for me.











The fog as captured by my camera looked like bubbles! Champagne bubbles?


Inside, real champagne waited in the fridge. We would save it for New Year's Day when we felt more celebratory. Tonight I longed only to fall asleep, knowing the fog swaddled everything outside, erasing the rough edges. Easing us into another year, like a veil drifting before our eyes, one that would be gone when morning came.

10 comments:

Vicki Lane said...

Beautiful, beautiful post! And the pictures are lovely and mysterious. The lamp in the window -- such a perfect image of home and warmth and shelter.

Of course, I should point out that as a poet, fercripessake, you should be swirling around in the moonlight garbed in gauzy silks, trailing a deep colored (purple? green?) hooded velvet cloak -- not muddy scuffs and a gray nubby bathrobe. Dang, woman!

Brenda Kay Ledford said...

Kay,
I love your poem about the Blue Moon. The moon sure has been beautiful lately. It looks as though you could just reach outside the window and touch it.

doris diosa said...

Happy New Year, Cabbage Sister . . . would you believe ? i actually went outside and took (bad) photos of the Full Moon thru the fog here, as well! i might have written something too but more haiku like. In short, i enjoyed the post, and the poem (especially the ending) as usual.

Glenda Council Beall said...

Kay, I love the muddy scuffs and the nubby robe. Such a contrast to your poetic language - the lovely poem. What is about the moon and poets? The moon and writers in general?
We all love the moon.

Jessie Carty said...

wish i had known there was a blue moon but thanks for recounting it :)

love the pictures you took. especially the one of the window looking from the outside.

Kathryn Stripling Byer said...

Thanks, Vicki, for nice words about the photos. So frustrating to want to capture the night and not have the skill for it with my camera. Maybe poetry works better, anyway. Brenda Kay, just wanting to touch the moon, yes.....doris, jessie, glenda, you poets know just what we mean.
Garbed in gauzy silks, oooo and a hooded purple coat, what a poetic fantasy. Sorry I disappointed you, Vicki. I do have a long gauzy sari cloth my daughter brought back from India for me but I'dd kill myself if I tried to swirl around in the dark in that! (Poet kills herself while celebrating the full moon! Is found in back yard wrapped in muddy sari...)

Joan Ellen Gage Admin said...

Very nicely done. I loved the bubbles.
Were'nt you very cold in your robe? I only snuck a quick peek at the moon, then Brrr hurried back inside.

Vicki Lane said...

Oh, okay then. What a dreadful collision of poesy and reality that would be. Like whatshername, flamboyant artiste of some sort, whose long silk scarf caught in the wheel of the sports car she was riding in and strangled her . . .

Vicki Lane said...

Isadora Duncan -- that's who I meant.

Kathryn Stripling Byer said...

I stay in my bathrobe as long as i can these days. 7 degrees? Please. Why get out of bed? I agree Joan Ellen. Brrr.
Poor Isadora. To die in such a way after having revolutionaized dance. Not fair. Now all we see is the scarf tangled in the wheel and Isadora stangled. yes, the rhyme is intentional. And that's what makes her death such a cliche, the way of her death, when she was a pioneering woman of the arts---and other things. No easy rhyme to her life.