Born of the Moon
Born of the Moon
by Dan Raphael
Babies too big in the moon with mom tattooing gps across skin-time in ancient script
to identify, indemnify against a transposed background of architecture archeologizing vases
we cant make yet, teeth biting through wire with persistent questions
as charging arguments extol the raisin rain, extra virgin rain, rain we don’t want
talking to the car ready to find a road like caramel anchovies stirred in milk
without animal origin—milk from magazines, milk from hoofless mountains
An oaken chest now my chest not drawered but pigeon holes switching places
a mechanized 3D chess board without kings or bishops, with accountants, engineers and djs,
we don’t know how the pieces move, when the board moves, gps for gypsys
who are always here as wagonized motor homes solar winds turn a field into a market–
market intelligence, market humor, i subscribe with a genome, the interest is mutation
We’ll be out of bread tomorrow when the bakerys on sabbatical, when the day doesn’t change just because of night when nothing closes, we sleep in our work places
careful not to drift onto conveyors, into robot tentacles suggesting three elbows per limb, spherical wrists so i can write on my own hand piercing the flesh with solder
so bright and promising: give us this day our daily voltage, resistance defines character,
i wont leap til i can glide
Ask the moon questions and watch its eyes, lost like craters, dust instead of tears
escapes before evaporating all the structural members beneath the eons
of paint, detritus, almosts & maybes. the technology to take a picture in the same place
once a month for a thousand years. incompatible with our viewers, our eyes,
rampant compression, pixel elations, something fresh for breakfast
with the wings too milk-damp to more than buzz & shimmer.
Maps drawn on sand with memory and attitude, deepening dents where depressions flourish, rising as a challenge, coffee like magma, soil receiving seeds encrypting their own tails
as the sun chases its off-spring the moon enrapt with long-leashed freedom
breaking away the bucket we were saving to shower when the sun gets so naked
even our bones began to sweat—we couldn’t even touch ourselves,
hand slipping through, fingers like ripe fruit the flies volunteering to flesh us,
the mosquitoes ready to change our fluid &, vacuum our interiors for 19.99
Who would want a baby they couldn’t name, a baby we had to change countries to live with,
have a tongue transplant to learn the language programmed in the babys third eye,
baby running before it could hold a fork, refusing to wear any color but black,
only drinking when its underwater, baby who won’t sleep when the moon’s above
no matter how intense the cloud cover, how deep we bury the baby in libraries
under 17 layers of troy, as the whole village tells individual stories
the baby transcribes in overcooked cereal transforming the torrent of post-industrial formula
into sculptural gardens we run through ecstatically shredding our skin
with the multi-barbed stamens of the baby’s galactic tear-down and remodel—
if you lived in this baby you’d be where now, behind the wheel of this one-owner baby
still under warranty, Stevie singing ” maybe your baby’s done/ made some/ other plans”
Don’t want to analyze, explain it. It just performs, larger than analysis, larger than explanation, yet with a sense of perfection, overreaching itself into other areas that somehow cohere. Will say this: its underriding device is repetition, which comes back to making a baby, its own baby in a shifting, incoherent world that gets ahead of itself as it’s held behind. This is a poem for poets to come back to, not to ferret out meaning but to observe, better appreciate, and incorporate as a modus operandi of one’s own psyche, not by imitation but analogy.
Randall–thanks so much for your comments and energies. gives me some insight to the piece,