Slow Dance
Jan 1 2014


The moon was once 6 times as bright.
A second dawn

when it was full, and rising.

6 times as large,
a giant orb, tipping the horizon

tempting you to touch.

How claustrophobic, 6 times as close,
filling the sky
like an unblinking eye
interrogating earth.

And instead of the brilliant void
we would have felt alone,
its powerful light
blotting out the stars,
reducing space
to a milky glow.

When a day on earth
was hours shorter,
a younger planet
spinning faster, back then.
Because the earth and moon
are like slow dancers, holding hands;
the moon
tugging for distance
as it leans into its spin,
while the planet's invisible grip
bleeds it of speed.

We think of the heavens as fixed,
eternal background
to our brief chaotic lives.
Like the night we walked
under a full moon
hand-in-hand,
leaving footprints, in cool sand
where high water
would soon level everything.
Never imagining
that in the distant past
we would have been far out to sea,
a swollen moon, and its massive tide
leaving no trace.

Before the two circling bodies
let slip.
Before moon and earth
drifted apart,
began
their slow inexorable split.


I heard this about the moon and earth on a recent RadioLab episode (a very popular podcasts from the public radio station WNYC, out of New York): that days used to be shorter and the moon closer; and that it was the interplay of gravity between the planet and its satellite that, over time, both slowed the earth and propelled the moon further out.

I think the analogy of two dancers was theirs. Or did they use throwing a ball?!! Anyway, I like the idea that what we regard as reassuringly permanent is nothing but. And I like a clockwork cosmos imagined as a kind of slow dance: these massive heavenly bodies in ponderous majestic motion; and the fixed laws of physics and invisible bonds of gravity and precise exchange of energy that tie them together. ...I'm hearing the music of the spheres, and getting visions of Stanley Kubrik's 2001!

But a "physics" poem that simply restates this fact in fancier language would be of no interest to anyone, except as a stylistic exercise. To make the poem worth reading, I needed to somehow humanize and personalize it. So the moon and earth become a metaphor for a couple that is also drifting apart. The metaphor can even be read into the beginning of the poem, which -- at least on re-reading -- becomes more foreshadowing than mere description: trying to touch, but being out of reach; the interrogation, like a suspicious spouse giving her partner the 5th degree; the feeling of being alone amongst all the stars in the sky. (Although I confess I didn't write it with this in mind. In fact didn't even know the poem would for in this direction when I came up with the first few stanzas. So, have I become the earnest student, eager to impress his teacher by torturing meaning and symbolism out of an innocent poem? Am I trying too hard to make a whole out of what is really 2 different poems?)

I think the other thing going on here is the perception of time: the unimaginable slowness of geological and astronomical time, set against our own fleeting lives. So what seems permanent is not; and what seems crucial is utterly insignificant: we are footprints in the sand, and ultimately leave no trace.