Phillip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella
This is the best shot I could get, with my little HP digital camera, of the moon as it rose above the trees this evening. Some manics' cycles can get more or less in synchrony with the phases of the moon. This observed synchrony is the source of the term lunatic, I suppose. I was a teenage lunatic, I believe; my manic highs often seemed to coincide with the full moon when I was in my teens and twenties. Not so much anymore. Like Ptolemy's celestial mechanics, the maniacal have cycles within cycles.
After mom was killed in 1978 (on Sept. 11), I strongly associated the moon with my mother. I became pretty delusional; I talked to "angels" and "spirits" when the moon was full. I put quotes around those two words because words are not adequate at all to describe what I experienced. The way I remember it, at least, I didn't sleep through one night out of three for a year or more after her death, and didn't sleep at all during the full moon.
I have written many poems about the moon. Even as wrecks in my personal junkyard of verse, they aren't worth spit for the most part. I don't see much in the way of salvagable spare parts. I may be able to finish a poem about my mother; I see it as a possibility. Poetry is the shorthand of the soul. I'm a pretty good stenographer.
There may not be a man in the moon, but there's plenty of moon in the man.
