Ephemeral

Full moon tonight. 8:02PM moonrise. We can be that specific. 65 degrees, clear with 3% skycover.

Drawn as I am to these spectacles, I imagine completed daily obligations, taking my station out front to watch the crowning over rooflines, waiting to get a full glimpse as she imperceptibly, nonetheless steadily moves above tree branches.

What is it that draws me out like this? The softness of its glow. The presence of her unblemished circle, that mandalic perfection. I could reach it almost, so close as to pocket it. Also, the otherworldliness. Her distance, tantalizingly out of reach. An eye-light there, connecting my own, returning an unblinking gaze as long as I could hold it. We have that agreement. Until at last it starts to disappear, or I do. Life moves on.

But I return, as she does. We meet more regularly these days. It’s a realignment on my part, this reallocated fidelity. At first it felt daring, like the time I sat out on my porch late on a June night. Enough moonlight to see by as I poured out the real of me to her. But I did wonder what the neighbors thought, or anyone who might catch this exposure. I made every move silent, as if I were stealing. And I was. I thought I was stealing time, setting out a jar of tap water to capture the moonlight powers, bottling up its night magic for some as yet unfathomed daytime use. Thinking back now, that’s silly. I was stealing myself, from definitions I wonder (then as now) whether I had any right to extricate. 

I think of the last full moon (how many times I tried to capture it then, too). All that has happened since. How many miles – thousands. How many heartbeats. How many revolutions of time, how many evolutions of me – how many thoughts, how many unmade minds remade. What’s going on, on the other side anyway? In the dark undersides of hemispheres, life happening beneath my surface as I sit here peripherally. So much I can’t know.

But I remember Operation Extrication. I’ve heard it can be productive to set goals by moon cycles, cast them before its night sways, watch as they manifest under her gravitational tendrils. I can never be that ambitious. Maybe I can’t set myself up for that kind of disappointment. There’s a lot we can measure, predict. The Hunt and the Harvest – they happen according to their own timelines. Tonight I sit with my own shadow under the halo of Hunter’s Moon. Take reprieve from all too solar cycles, mark meaning by my own lights. Now, before the moment passes.