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Village life: Moon was immense, swollen gold orb

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By Jan Worth-Nelson

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

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I never know exactly what triggers sudden happiness in this old town, but in the case of the last Poetry Under the Stars reading at Longway Planetarium, I'm blaming it on the moon.

As Ted and I set out for the reading, which featured Rafael Mojica, Juan Mestas, Scott Russell and Joseph Tyler, the moon was immense, a swollen gold orb rising magnificently over Court Street.

That's my moon, I thought. That exact moon rising over that exact street, glowing fatly over the Double J Market, where for years I've been buying Bushmills and tonic water and where I always commiserate with the clerks about how sad it is our prissy neighbors made them cover up their orange paint.

(With beige, for crud's sake. Beige? The blandest stick on the color wheel? Really? I liked the audacious orange, especially in dim winter, when the only color to speak of is clutches of cardinals at our feeders, if we're lucky. What do people have against color? It this some kind of faux snooty propriety? I grew up in churches where the fundamentalists opposed art of any kind and were feverishly frightened by images — secular or sacred. As an adult, I wouldn't trust a one of these bitterly humorless ascetics with my time, my tithe or my vote.)

Anyway, the moon that night rose grandly over Court Street — close in its orangey glow to the lost ochre of the Double J Market. One would hope the beauty of that moon is something we could all agree on, despite its curious and ongoing connection with "lunacy" and "lunatics."

(As poet Thomas Budday declaimed in his poem Lunatic at Good Beans recently, "he called her a lunatic / which means of the moon / as if that were anything to be ashamed of.")

That moon rising over Court Street, a street literally central to my life for the past three decades, signified something.

It mattered that the moon glided up regally over black trees I know very well — "just the right height," I guess — whatever Willard "Mitt" was getting at in his dorky way.

Those trees and the moon and that street are what I have now in daily life, and what I call home.

Going in I glimpsed Scott, an old friend from UM-Flint and compadre in a long ago writing workshop. He was catching a quick smoke and a moment alone behind the planetarium, basking, I imagined, in the actual sky and lunar extravaganza. There's loneliness in moonlight and poetry, and I recognized the way he might have been drawing into himself, preparing for his reading.

Scott was one of the four poets, a quartet of cosmopolitan men in beards, three of them reading in Spanish. Adding a few sips of red wine to my moonlit mood, I sunk back in my seat, nestled onto Ted's shoulder, and watched the stars wheel over.

That's one of the best things about the Poetry Under the Stars series — the voices of poets calling out into the bowl of darkness, the ceiling stars rotating and rotating. I almost always go into a trance, and it's deeply restful.

Each of the poets had their own experience that night.

Rafael, for one, says he came to the reading reluctantly — public performance not his métier. Still he read poems by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a 17th century Mexican nun and feminist before her time.

Of the two of his own poems he read in Spanish, one was called, "It is those horses, their green gallop," which he delivered while the Kronos Quartet galloped through a haunting Mexican folk song in the background. The combination mesmerized.

Mestas said he is never sure reading poems in Spanish here is a good idea, when he knows most of the audience won't understand his words. For me the sound of language has always been primal and primary. It didn't matter whether I could "understand." Being there soaking up the rhythms through my bones and heartbeat was enough.

Staring at the actual night sky is scary and intimidating. I've had existentially dicey moments — on beaches at Bois Blanc and Beaver Islands, on tipsy boats in the deep Pacific, on campgrounds in the desert — when the sky was just too big, the endless expanse too inscrutable. I can only take so much of the universe. After awhile I need to go back inside, to meet up with other humans under roofs where the sky is easier to ignore.

So it wasn't lunacy I felt in the planetarium, my eyes full of winter moonlight. It was gratitude.

With friends on every hand and the sonorous voices of poets ringing out, I felt at home — in my planetarium, my neighborhood, my town, my planet. It was a moment of happiness I count as incomparable, a suitable distraction and argument against sadness, triviality and fear.

(The next Poetry Under the Stars event is March 13, featuring Arabic poet Ibaa Ismail and Arabic students presented by Jamile Lawand. April 10 features Vittorio Trionfi (French) and French students, with Grayce Scholt and Jan Worth-Nelson. All events start at 7 p.m. with a reception to meet the poets at 6:30 p.m. Contact Richard Walker or Cathy Gentry at (810) 237-3450 or visit Sloanlongway.org for more information.)

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Columnist and poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.

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