Luna

A bloody head reeled out of the city smoldering on the eastern horizon, then an klieg-lit mask, splotched with irregular birthmark patches, hoisted on high, all nearby stars suppressed as if by your lordship of lights, you own the night.

A faint penumbral cast crosses your visage like the flicker of prophecy, and then a black woolly strip like an eyebrow (maybe one of mine) attaches to your eastern rim, and like the outworking of a doom, propagates across the surface of your disc. Gradually, the silver-white burning magnesium sheen cornered, pushed over the western edge, extinguished, you become...

Ruddy and flaky-looking like the top of pastry, a two-dimensional object turned globular, just a sub-planet, just! Stripped by our shadow of your glamour, you become a textbook astronomical object, one of the moons, and as it happens, ours; theater becomes lecture hall.

Is there a larger drama here? The slowing speed, the spiralling-inward orbit, fissures appearing and growing on your surface: all presage your eventual obliteration due to the baleful effects of this earth whereon we stand as, gazing up at you, a white blade appearing now over the rim of your eastern edge, you don again your mask, tattooed as a harpooner's face, and, oracular, glare at us with dire import.

Peach

A mass of scimitar-curved leaves, and, like lightbulbs shining the darkness, orange-yellow-pink fruit glowing in the afternoon sunlight: my neighbor's peach tree. Planted when the Haitian family moved into the house about 20 years ago, you have grown into a thick-trunked, full-crowned tree thick nearly 25 feet tall and bending with fruit.

Up on my tall stepladder, my head among your branches, I search for clusters of peaches or singletons hidden behind the scooping leaves. There's one to pluck and drop in the bag I carry under my arm, its strap over my shoulder. Oh, a little cluster, there, and two more...if I stretch...whoops...ah, gottem. I pull your flexible branches down, down, and strip them of their globular gold, presaging the night's blood moon. Tippy-top, too high on you for me to reach safely, some drops of peach sweetness still hang, inaccessible to all but the sun that birthed them.    

Such fruit! Your peaches are a little narrow, thick of skin and rather fuzzy, sometimes mottled, sometimes weepy with syrupy juice, no supermarket beauties these, in fact so irregular and ugly that I'm surprised repeatedly at how sweet and flavorful they are. The flesh is firm, a little stringy, but so rich in special peach flavor that I keep eating one more. Will this next one disappoint? No, no, it doesn't. My beard is dripping.

My generous neighbor shares the wealth that I love to climb for. There's abundance for all. Tucked between two houses and generally ignored, you've off-handedly laden us with bountiful blessing. I find it, in a way, hard to grasp how so much comes from a life planted two decades ago and left to grow as it would. You shame the poor-mouth talk that so fills the world. 

Rock talk

My friend Flossie writes: So you were traveling. Thanks for telling us. Anything to share? Isn't the best part of a journey reviewing the adventures? Bears? Earthquakes? Crippling diarrhea? These kinds of stories told in a bar over a pitcher of, say, Sam Adams are more fun than actually travelling. By the way, who in their right mind goes on vacation and thinks about fusty old Thomism? You're right: yours truly.

I've not been able to get away, what with my new job, but I did spend a weekend with an old friend from my college writing program. She lives with her husband in a huge house on the very edge of the ocean in Cape Ann. What a view of the vastness of the sea!

She told me as she showed me around that it had been in her husband's family for years and that every summer each of the branches of the family had rights to take a turn staying there for the swimming off the rocks, the boating, the tide pool dabbling, or the sunset cocktail sipping on the veranda.

The morning after I got there, two of her nieces arrived each with a friend. There was lots of bustle as they settled into something like a bunkroom in the back, then hustled down to try the water at the tiny beach at the foot of the garden. It was clear the attractions of the place had been oversold. The water was cold, we geezers were boring, and the nearest night life was half an hour away. The stories the family kids told of what they had loved about the place didn't cut any ice. The bumptious youngsters headed out that evening to mix with their own kind at a bar.  It was Saturday night after all.

My friend and I sat on the granite ledge looking out over surf breaking over the rocks, and swirling in the guts and fissures between and watching the moon rise over the heaving water. We spoke with some amazement about the fact we were there, she marrying into this extensive Yankee family late in life and me just escaped from my most recent romantic incarceration. Isn't it wonderfully strange when we stop and ask, how did I get here? If we had thought as young girls what we would have to do to end up on those rocks as we were, a little sad but happy, it would have been a tightrope we'd have had to walk. But, unthinking, we made the right and left turns that had brought us there.

Do you know what I wish? To have been able to somehow paint or otherwise preserve the image of that rising moon and the two of us old women looking out at it. Oh, to be a Winslow Homer. Wouldn't that be more than all the philosophy you and I have steeped ourselves in.

Perfection

Driving back from Nova Scotia listening to lectures on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, I thought about the doctrine of your perfection, God, and about how uncomfortable I am with it. Over and over, Aquinas' argument is that if there were something you had to learn, or do, or become, you wouldn't be complete, wouldn't be perfect, wouldn't be the God the philosophers and the theologians posit as the final local reference point, the absolute.

Where does that leave you, I wonder, God, but trapped in a situation with no possibility of risk, nor of discovery, since you are all-knowing and all-powerful. For you, the future is already. You can never be surprised. There's a cool, crystalline rigidity to Aquinas' portrait of you that conflicts with the dynamism that characterizes world as I see it. Some of the most powerful responses we have to our world include curiosity and awe, but while you may be the object of these, you are never to feel these powerful drives which so often motivate us.

We live in time and you outside it. Through contemplation insight, some may experience trans-temporality, and even come to feel it more real than the perpetual change we endure or enjoy, how can it be that that which is so fundamental a factor in our experience cannot be a part of yours, and we to make common cause?

Contemplating the Thomist position is like having a grand piano fall on one's head, playing majestic chords all the while. It was an experience which took me some days to recover from. T. makes lots of interesting distinctions--actuality and potentiality, form and matter, essence and existence, substance--and they all work together to make an edifice which feels like it must be taken whole or not at all. That he assumes your existence before he argues for you isn't the problem; the cogency of one's arguments that matters in philosophy since nobody comes to the work without background or bias. No, it's the implacability of his logic herding me into the divine absolutism he attributes to you that made me uneasy, until I remembered the importance of novelty and discovery, and the need for an open future, for our sense of humanity.

Today's nihilisms and materialisms dismiss you, of course, but still have the power to trap us in an inescapable webs of propositions that leave us no future or reason for wanting one, and only the old stoicisms and epicureanisms to inspire us, duty or delectation and all the time dupes of our biology.

Perhaps with a more mystical bent, I might see you otherwise, but I prefer thinking of you as God-in-love, inviting me to share your hot-blooded striving to summon into fulfillment your Beloved other, certainly not frozen in the complacency of perfection.

With whom?

Who am I with when I'm alone? Driving around Atlantic Canada a week ago, I wondered about the experience of camping beside a river, on a bluff overlooking the sea, in an abandoned gravel quarry: I wasn't sending pictures and so in 'conversation' with people at home, but even so, I didn't feel lonely but rather intensely engaged with wherever I was.

My uncle, 95 now, suggested I was actually companioned by the traces of my life so far, the layers of my past being. So the Other was my former self or selves--who I had been up till that moment, each occasion then being the culmination of what had undergone to date.

It seemed to me that, rather than memory being my companion, I was instead accompanied by expressions of my perennial desires--the love of flowing water, for instance, in the form of river, or surf.

Was I with anyone, anything, at all? Was there in fact no companionship? Maybe I didn't feel lonely because I had no sense of exclusion or abandonment, and absent these conditions, I simply 'was', in a flow of consciousness that was busy with its own flow, as the the Machias river had been when I bathed in it my first day out.

I don't know why the question occurred to me except that sometimes I was aware of being where I was and alone, and that fact addressed in some way to someone, whom I never could tell.

Yet I remember my last evening out, alone in an old excavated site within earshot of the Airline, Rte 9, but completely out of sight of it, building a small fire out of the abundance of dry wood nearby, steaming 5 lbs of mussels in a stockpot I'd bought in Calais for the occasion, then eating the contents of shell after shell (and quaffing hard cider at the same time) as I sat in the evening sun on stool on top of a small hill looking down on my car, thinking 'This is a splendid moment and I know it even as I enjoy it,' and, from today's perspective, I was right.

On stage

Seven girls, three boys, maybe nine years old, lead by their portly female adult comes in the park, leave their water in a grove of multi-colored tall plastic bottles, and proceeds into the cemetery which abuts the park with particular boundary between. In the distance among the graves I see them go, marking, prancing, skipping, dawdling, now one, now three, now almost all disappear in the distance beyond the plodding adult.

Are they a daycamp? A summer school? Do they go to view graves of the famous people of the small community of Cap Pele and hear stories of their virtues? Is there ice-cream somewhere beyond park and cemetery?  

I, sitting on a bench, trying to eat a juicy fourneau Acadien, a compote of apples, raisins and cranberries baked inside a bread dough 'oven', think: is car  trouble what it took to get me to stop, sit, watch, and see a little of the life of the place in the high spirits of these children. (Sticky droozlings on hands, arms, bench...)

The park, built on the site of the Joli Coeur school (happy heart?) I learn from the plaque, has a small theater, a war memorial with a statue of a soldier holding an absurdly small rifle, and so many names, all of them privates, the grunts, a small gazebo, and a small sculpture called Se Faisant. All around the buzz of men on tractor movers keeping it all trim. 

Back they come but to the stage where they immediately congregate and jump around. I want to intervene and say, 'Let's try this: Once there was a little girl with a red hood...', just to encourage their imagination, but I was clearly not needed. They soon had something going which involved cartwheels, high-stepping, lots of consultations, running onto the stage and off, shouting, synchronization, and all manner of similar business. One seemed to be a director, then another. There was rush for the water, an amble back to the stage, and finally, at the behest of the adult, a gathering to leave. 

You lovely life-forms, you star-bursts of arms, legs and shouts, you theater theatering, you gathering of growth, how this stranger on the bench was grateful for the opportunity to witness your exuberance on this superlative day.