I heard a story of a young guy who used to go for walks with an older poet, a dispenser of lyrical wisdom. Leave the moon alone, he advised.
Paige insists this kind of advice must be ignored: “Don’t trust anyone who says ‘Poetry has had enough of these things.’ Because what they’re actually saying is ‘I have had enough of these things.’ & how could anyone who’s ‘had enough of the moon’ be right about poetry?”43
A person who “cries for the moon” wants too much—wants, in fact, more wanting—weeps into the lack. You can’t make a wish upon the moon.
Shirley Temple cried real tears when a classmate died, she writes in her autobiography, and they stained the page of the classmate’s yearbook photo. To the official caption, “She would give you the moon if she had it,” the actress made a small addition, “carefully ink[ing] one word, ‘Dead.’”44
Asked about the moon’s composition in 1902, children respond:
It is made of rags . . . or the man in it is stuffed with them . . . it is a picture with yellow paint . . . made of yellow paper . . . putty . . . gold . . . silver . . . honey . . . cotton . . . a lucky stone . . . a cake of ice . . . of many stars . . . air . . . brass . . . a plate . . . a balloon . . . clouds . . . a ball . . . tallow . . . a lamp, candle or gas . . . of light . . . of dirt . . . water . . . cloth . . . a bundle of sticks on fire . . . milk . . . butter . . . felt . . . lightning . . . made of dead people who join hands in a circle of light . . . some bright dish hung up . . . water and dirt like the earth . . . a dead skull . . . a water pail . . . it is God, Christ, or anyone else . . . is the face or head of some dead relative or friend . . . stuck through the clouds, or the body goes straight toward the sky and is hidden from us by the head.45
Their collection of answers acts upon me like a spell, leaves me enchanted, bewitched. It is a “heap of language,” a pile of moon dust. Or it is a house made entirely of windows, in every one a child’s round face.
This winter, if the wood from outside the supermarket was too damp to catch fire, we’d add Fatwood sticks from inside the supermarket, and this is civilization, which NASA says will come to an end in the article I won’t read, because today I don’t feel like crying.
We don’t need wood anymore. It is the first day of spring and I need daffodils, but they’re not yet apparent, so instead I look at the picture my mother sent me of her mother in a whole field of them. Kew Gardens, perhaps, the park just minutes from their flat. I think of William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” which ends with a journey to the hospital:
On the way
we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,
What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.46
Mr. Williams, I too had an English grandmother, but I don’t know her last words, only that she died in South Africa near her older daughter, who moved there with her husband, formerly a student of gardening at Kew.
We treat the dying as if they’ve lost their reason, as infants who’ve somehow misbehaved. We want them to be good. The dying want their mothers, but their mothers are nowhere to be found, are maybe still back among the flowers. How Bill died I do not understand. I mean this literally. I do not know what happened. By then we barely spoke. If I saw him at all I saw him agitated and drunk, and it was simpler to avoid his company.
Who moves to South Africa in 1962? My aunt, a white English woman. Her husband, a white Dutch man. We did not visit until 1992, when Apartheid was coming at last to an end. White people seemed fitful, afraid. “I’d rather burn my house down than let them have it,” said one, in his pinched accent. I remember only a single instance of crying from this trip. My sister and I, trapped, in our aunt’s backyard pool. The Rottweiler—a pet or a guard dog—circled and circled, growling, would not let us out. Of the few commands he understood, my uncle most often told him to voetsek, Afrikaans for “fuck off.” We were afraid he’d tear us in two.
Early this morning the radio says divers have taken the first photographs of a steamship that sank in 1880, when it was split in two by another ship in heavy fog. Standing in the darkness of the kitchen I understand this as a metaphor for giving birth.
Errol Morris’s documentary about the former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, borrows its title from a Prussian military theorist, who wrote:
Finally, the general unreliability of all information presents a special problem in war: all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.47
Last night the television played endless clips of crying politicians, including one misty-eyed candidate whose impending grandparenthood has pundits predicting her campaign’s emotional weather.
Struck by associations and without pen or paper, I run from the kitchen to search the house for what I need, and when I turn my head for a moment away from the page I’ve begun to scribble, I see the milk I was warming on the stove is about to boil over.
When my baby is born the smell of milk will draw her slowly up to my breast. I’ve seen videos, the newborn inching gradually to the nipple, through the confusion of the brightest light she’s ever known.
People talk about the fog of pregnancy, the forgetfulness, the book neatly put away in the refrigerator. The other week I tried to make a new friend, but became distracted before writing down my phone number’s last two digits.
I prefer to cry with a friend, but these days I am often alone. Exhausted by an argument with Chris, I retreat to the solitude of the bathroom.