THE LUNAR YEAR

Hunger Moon

That’s when the food ran out. The stock

Depleted even the saved potatoes gone

Rotten at the eyes. Our savings cleft

By half, all love foreclosed, the doors

Of home padlocked, the windows boarded.

What else can happen? Weather broods

Over the bleak horizon. This moon is also known

As the snow moon.

Crow Moon

The raven invented the world, now the crow rules

Its lesser partitions. It encompasses

The slyness of politicians, the ruthlessness of love.

It waits for things to die or else it torments

Songbirds, those who can tongue

A harmony every crow despises.

Egg Moon

The lost wax process creates an egg

Of gorgeous dimensions, Byzantine

Geometrics suggesting a rage of contained

Passion. But another egg is pure.

Cool in the palm and distant

As that place where everything begins.

Milk Moon

It is this specialization that defines us.

How we link to every creature

That nurses its young. That

Baptismal drink the Orient refuses

After a certain age. What sort of wisdom

Clinks bottles on a stoop at dawn

Like earliest, beloved memories.

Strawberry Moon

You find them knitting the pasture

With rubies, the wild sort

Whose sweetness is so compact, so perfect

That cultivation seems a sort of sin

Original as the path that led us out

Of infancy to the bloody-hearted world

Wearing its seeds like a cloak.

Thunder Moon

Everything here depends on nitrogen

Of which thunder is merely the voice

As a slap is the sound of forked anger,

The sound angels made as they fell

Into the firmament, the first denial.

Sturgeon Moon

Producers of caviar and isinglass

One richly edible, the other a bonding agent

Like the lust that glues two lovers.

Flesh of temperate waters. The miracle

That feeds a jubilation

Of disbelievers. Cast your net. Have patience.

Barley Moon

All grains were once wild

Uncultivated, there for the reaping

There for the first lively spirits

Fermenting like every wish into

Something achievable, the malt

Of high ambition.

Harvest Moon

Every goddess walks

Under that parasol, her arms

A cornucopia of fulfillment.

No wonder we worship this

Unblemished guise. No wonder

We think no matter how many banks

Fail, how many ships break into pieces

In the coming gales, we’ll still

Have this: how we were blessed

Just as the good times ended.

Hunters Moon

That’s what we do when everything

We counted on has collapsed

And all coffers are empty, all drawers

Divested of silk, all trigger fingers

Reinvested with darkness. Walk

Silently in the tracks of the dispossessed

Ensuring it will not be you.

Cold Moon

Hunker down. Survival is now the key

To your heart, the tone-deaf song.

If you make a fire it is certain

To go out while you’re asleep

You’ll wake with your feet frozen

In a crossroad of bad choices.

Shaking is the way your body

Fights cold like this. Huddle together.

Wolf Moon

They have come back, those predators

Of the prairie, the steppe, the open range.

Protected as a parliament

Of oligarchs. Their guard hairs rising

As they sight you, out there

In your unarmed villages.

North American Review