The full moon does something to a poet that a half-moon cannot. I will not pretend to know what it is. I will only report the symptoms.
It was bitter cold in Santa Fe — the dry kind that makes the moon look like it has been sharpened on something. I had been working on a manuscript all week, and on the night the moon was full I gave up on the desk and walked outside and stood in the yard in a coat that was not quite warm enough. My breath kept getting in front of the page in my head.
I drafted three lines on my phone. They were not good lines. They had the moon doing too much — leaning, watching, knowing — all the verbs a moon should never be asked to perform. But there was something in the standing-there that I needed to keep. A reminder, maybe, that some poems begin as bad evidence of a real moment, and the work is to find the one true sentence inside the bad evidence and let the rest go.
Embrace With Love
In moments dim, when shadows loom, And pain whispers an eerie tune, Ask with heart, in silent room, What would love, in kindness, bloom?
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →I came back inside and wrote a different draft entirely. The moon was not in it. The cold was not in it. What was in it was the way being awake at two in the morning makes you honest in a way the daytime version of you cannot quite afford to be.
That, I have come to think, is what the full moon actually does to a poet. It does not give you metaphors. It gives you a window of slightly louder honesty, and if you are paying attention you do not waste it on the moon.
I am leaving in a few weeks. Sister and a few of the Maine crew are meeting me down south for a winter break — flights, not the four-day desert drive everyone keeps assuming. I will write about that trip when it is the trip's turn. Tonight is still December and Santa Fe and a moon I owe nothing to.