Live from the surface of the moon

 Live From the Surface of the Moon
    
 The landing leg (porch) jets
 a web of shadows across lunar
 powder while brilliantly bleached
 astronauts lope across the frame
  
 On Sunday July 20th 1969
 I am not yet two : : do not divine
 how the moon mirrors the sun
 and the magnificent desolation
  
 of a Rockland County building site
 bald of grass : : each split-level home 
 a lunar module far from inflation
 Vietnam race riots assassination
  
 I cannot possibly remember thirty-
 plus hours with Walter Cronkite and
 Wally Schirra : : parents buzzing
 as transmissions crinkle and flicker : :
  
 much less an animation of the Eagle
 advancing toward the Sea of Tranquility 
 or shots of the LEM’s quadruped replica
 in Bethpage Long Island : : bug face
  
 with a long metal snout between
 wide black reflective window eyes
 (choked-up Cronkite says those kids
 who are kind of pooh-poohing this thing
  
 I’d like to know what they thought
 at this moment when our mouths
 were in our throat : : How can anyone
 turn off to a world like this)
  
 With one-sixth of adult gravity
 I bound through oversized rooms
 careful not to jag my special suit
 on an exposed martini glass : : every
  
 high-altitude glance or word
 a UFO : : ‘One small step for man’
 the anchor explains but I didn’t get
 the second phrase : : until static
  
 lulls me to sleep : : The grown-ups
 tip themselves into a queen-size
 while Aldrin and Armstrong tuck
 each other in on an airless satellite
  
 perhaps under yellow foil blankets
 but how could I know : : each maybe-
 memory overwritten now like
 boot prints in moondust
  
 by footage on my little screen
 (who would have thought the future
 would be small) : : What I carry out
 in my sample bag is not mankind leaping but
  
 a nightmare : : Giant mechanical
 spiders chasing me across the dead
 land : : I lope to a quilted islet
 hop up on the shadowy porch : : only 
  
 my groggy parents do not want me
 Precarious love : : Any moonman might
 splash down safely and find home 
 isn’t safe and never really was 

Several years ago, I was running a workshop at the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, using “moon” as an example of how different kinds of rhyme work (slant rhyme: can or boot; pararhyme: man; macaronic: la lune, and so forth). When we did a free-write, the idea for a poem percolated up. I had never written about my indirect memory of the 1969 moon landing. My mother told me there had been a party and I had watched some of it, but all I remember is a nightmare later about what the poem calls “giant mechanical spiders” traversing a cratered black-and-white landscape. To fill in the details, I watched hours of the original broadcast on YouTube, learning that some of the most famous remarks from that night were misheard or bungled, and gained a much deeper sense than I’d had before of the landing’s cultural context. I’ll always be a romantic about space travel–I love good sf about it, I subscribed to Astronomy as a girl, and for a long time I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut–but it turns out I’ll only walk in the moon in poems.

It took me days to research and draft “Live From the Surface of the Moon,” then months to revise it, although certain formal considerations crystallized early. I wanted quatrains to echo the four-legged Lunar Excursion Module. I liked the run-on urgency of the way some lines arrived, so in looking for a less-than-final-sounding system of punctuation, the colon I experimented with turned into the double colon (resembling the LEM’s footprint). Notre Dame Review published the poem a couple of years ago and, just a week ago, I turned in edits on the poetry book that will reprint it: The State She’s In, forthcoming in March from Tinderbox editions. It’s not an especially moony collection, but it contains a lot of work about history, and also about whiteness–and one ends up thinking a lot about different meanings of whiteness, watching those old news programs.

So on this full moon weekend, I’m posting a brief clip from revision-land. Edits for my poetry book and my novel came in basically simultaneously, right as the school year started, so I’m really tired and overwhelmed lately. And once the edits are mission-accomplished, there’s a LOT more to do, of course, to launch these books. But I hope to have covers to reveal in coming weeks!–and till then, one small step at a time.