The Red Letters
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.
To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
––Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Poem #183
Two Apartments and the Moon
Those years I slept narrow
on a pushed-shut sofa bed,
apartment house rooflines
packed both sides of the close street.
The moon never claimed the night
in that room. Streetlight neutered
its traces, as did the tired bedsheet,
abandoned by someone else’s
onetime apartment-mate,
curtaining my single window.
*
When, in my decades shared with you,
I come to my feet at one a.m.,
pause at the kitchen window, moon-
light’s full expanse drapes the floor.
Lifts the previous day’s diseased news
like a draw of bad blood.
It will find me at four if again
I’m restless, up and wandering
to the front window and the still
street. If I pretend to speak for it,
it says stop and look up now.
Fullness is not always with you.
––David P. Miller
Drinking alone, I raise my cup
to the bright moon. Nowmoon, my shadow, and me, a party of three. . .
––Li Bai
(Tang Dynasty, China)
“I’ve always thought that––no matter what some say––there are not too many poems about the moon.” David Miller told me this in an e-exchange about his first Red Letter appearance, “Two Apartments and the Moon”––and I heartily agree. The moon seems an eternal presence in poetry: as subject matter, source of inspiration, sly obfuscation or tender reflection of our internal states of consciousness. Still, poets keep finding new ways of allowing that lunar light to grace their lines. And like their subject, famous moon poems traverse all borders, shine into windows everywhere: Li Bai, Rumi, and Basho; Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickinson, Whitman; Cummings, Plath, Langston Hughes, and continuing all through the contemporary masters. In David’s piece, the moon is both absence (in the first section where, after a painful divorce, he finds himself in a depleted living situation more reminiscent of his student days), and presence (after the speaker is happily re-married and his life feels more like the fullness of an April moon.) Reading the poem, I have no trouble remembering the loneliness depicted in that first section, where it seems that even the rooftops conspire to keep the poet in darkness. David’s word choices––neutered. . .tired. . .abandoned––make me feel a void inside my chest, dark as a new moon. But in the second section, I am able to feel gratitude (along with the speaker) for a more luminous circumstance––even if that variable orb provides a quiet warning about the changeable nature of things to which we human are subject. And there, between those two worlds, a simple asterisk, like a single early star––where we each can pause and make our fragile wish.
David’s “life in the arts” began, not with literature, but theater: for 25 years, he was a member of the interdisciplinary Mobius Artists Group, a Boston-based collective still creating experimental new works. For much of that time, he was also employed as a college librarian, and perhaps that helped prompt a new creative phase when, in his mid-fifties, he began to work seriously in poetry, a form he’d loved for years. He has since published a chapbook and two full-length collections, (the most recent being Bend in the Stair from Lily Poetry Review Press.) He is currently a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets group, and sits on the board of the venerable New England Poetry Club.
In her astonishing essay “Poetry and the Moon”, poet Mary Ruefle writes: “On the other hand, stars were the first text, the first instance of gabbiness; connecting the stars, making a pattern out of them, was the first story, sacred to storytellers. But the moon was the first poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glance, one that played upon the emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter.” In that same way, David offers us two theatrical tableaux, linked by a single protagonist who wanders alone in each room, trying to make sense of the narrative threads tangled through his days. No, maybe not alone: there’s also the moon, looking in, and the voice of a poem slowly emerging. I’ll gladly raise my cup to such companions.
Red Letters 3.0
* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:
steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com
* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices
and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter
@StevenRatiner
