on the moon, alice

...before i begin this post, i want to immensely apologize to my lovelies. it was a wonderful day, until i got a ridiculously sized headache, and passed out; only for my body to f**k my alarm, and wake up at this hour instead. grrr. nevertheless, i was googly eyed for much of mattawa's writing, either because i'm waking up from a dream world or because it's that damn good.

i want to focus on "for years i've been prohibited for mentioning the moon", one for its amazing title and two, for it being such a far reaching gem of a poem. section 1 of Zodiac of Echoes is, in and of itself, a phenomenal whirling section that hit my soul further than most quote unquote pastoral poems i've read. it reminded me of being in the backseat of my dad's car as a kid, and being convinced the moon was coming straight at us the further we drove to it. in this poem, the moon really does come straight at you. in the opening stanzas, he has -- and this by no means matches the beauty of it, but describes it perfectly -- lunar verbal diarrhea. at first, i wondered, is this an excuse to write a sestina? is he mimicking the form? but as i was immersed deeper in it, it immediately caused me to wonder just why he was prohibited from saying it in the first place.

So now the cedar-scented moon, and moon-
glow encasing the sky in lavender velvet,
clouds splotched on a moon-radiant sky
and a sickle moon raking a field of violets
and the moon and sun in Joseph's dream kneeling,
and how years ago we could've been on the moon
watching the city from an airplane,
the stadium lights a diamond necklace,
and she was there, a star singing...

brill.i.ant. i want to hear his musings on the moon, and everything that the moon illuminates. even those less desirable things, like underground pipes. mattawa's imagination takes him to what's not being seen, and he acts in moon-like fashion to shed light on the darkness and physical underbelly of this precious land. he reaches from the sky to the depths of the earth, and is fixated on it for most of the poem. he still doesn't provide an answer for why he was prohibited from saying "the moon", but leads us into something much deeper (pun intended). it begs a question of "what was lost", which again is not revealed, but the sense of loss is immense throughout the poem. is it a loss of language, or loss of humanity/respect for earth and its citizens? if water is a life source, why is it becoming poisonous, and trapped in these pipes? why does his brain go from here to the moon, and back?

the poem has no physical pauses, and we are encapsulated in between fire hydrants and "pipes stacked like pythons", though it is unclear to me what turning "into this subdivision" means other than to transition the poem from sky to earth. still, even if the poem's lines move us along without any breaks, it is nevertheless paced; it doesn't feel rushed. the commas help to pace the poem.

then, he suddenly whisks us back -- the interesting thing about mattawa's poems is they have no specific date and time on them, but you can feel that he's evoking history. he assures us of this by stating "i am moved again by something i felt before":

surrounded by the rubble of conquest
where there are only old stars and dead wolves,
i am moved again by something i felt before,
shaken, but without an atom of pity in my body,
filled with a transparency capable of bearing
the whole world, a void that takes on the moon
in the sky...

this intuition and feeling of the sky, of having witnessed it all, of acknowledging that we're comprised of the same elements as the moon and the ripping apart of time, all the while being intrinsically attached to matters of the earth, are woven beautifully together. he captures those moments that i only mumble about to myself at nights when no one's watching, and scribble when no one's around. "the wind" was equally amazing!