‘THE BONE-DRY moon that churns a planet’s seas is the ghostly pale moon dislodging
a gender’s blood.’
The myth of snow-white Raven stealing sun, moon, stars and water from
the eaves of Grey Eagle’s longhouse is for first-year creative writing. Try
practical science instead: the elements corresponding with roots, seeds,
leaves, flowers; plus lunar astrology. With the waxing of the moon the
earth exhales. Waxing is for seeding, fruiting; waning for maintenance.
1st – The Intimate Moon
A full moon after a super full moon is bigger and brighter than an average
full moon – and may be overpraised, a month too late. A super full moon
in the northern winter looks larger than its summer equivalent: the sun,
reaching around our planet from behind, hugs the satellite closer to itself.
2nd – Spaceship Moon
The ‘whack’ theory is absurd: a second collision to adjust the angular
momentum would have been so unlikely! Many of the ratios are base-ten
integers. Discarded modules make the moon ring like a bell. Its message,
in metrics and megalithic yards: ‘Go back in time; hang me like a medal.’
3rd – The Moonlight Sonata
Like raindrops, grace notes free-fall into the piano factories of the Ruhr –
fortissimo! Conservatory-trained camp kommandants were thought to be
pitch perfect. Beethoven huddled in his shelter, his hearing already kaput.
Choirs of allied angels take inspiration from a dog-eared atlas of craters.
4th – The Wet and Dry Moons
Some skywatchers speak of the upturned crescent as the wet moon, a bowl
brimming with winter rain and snow. Hawaiians, too roseate for drowning,
have their Dripping Wet Moon month. For others the imagined full bowl is
dryness briefly relished: it has yet to tilt to pour out its summer floods.
5th – The Ominous Moon
The asylum porch light is on the blink, confused by clouds. When the
moon sits full, its edge cuts sharp and can’t be wholly sheathed. A clan
of Urvolk wreaks demented havoc. Some enlightened surgeons warn that
victims who make it to hospital face the problem of less effective clotting.
6th – The Man on the Moon
Your second-hand Ford has a computer a thousand times cleverer. A flag
was planted (since there was none to capture), its ripples suggesting a
breeze. No monkey scouted the silver canyons. But the real conspiracy
was the lowballing of risk by mission control, the gamble on heroism.
All six – The Dealer’s Moon
Crust, mantle and core form the quiet concentric chord that orchestrates
the transfer of a small white packet on a dark bushy avenue of lighted
windows, the old embankment. The moon has secrets it will keep forever
behind its confident alibi: a pearl, weeping, in the goblet of milky sky.
♦
Introduction to Six-Way Mirror | The Index of Hexagrams and Cantos