he can’t
help himself
—the moon
is fully windowed—
syllables,
calling
This is how it is for him. It’s pathetic,
and even he knows it’s pathetic. He wakes up; it’s only just after three
so he makes himself go back to sleep, but he’s fully awake by 4:20 and he’s got
it stuck in his head: something about two small poems, three lines each, maybe
formal haiku, maybe some weird Americanized Kerouacian version, he doesn’t
really know, only knows he can’t help thinking Two Small Threes By Five over and over again until
finally he gets up to write them.
He thinks about where to start with the
writing, and he thinks there’s a harvest moon shining in the window, but at
first he doesn’t know this for a fact. He stops thinking about the
writing long enough to Google the phrase harvest moon, which, being a
good contemporary poet, he has vowed never to use in his writing, but it’s just
so very much there, flooding through the window, shining on his desktop,
shining on his keyboard, washing across his office floor, sure enough: a
harvest moon, shining on.
After the first three hard-won lines, he hits
the auto-set for Shankar and the Sandhya Raga fills the room like
moonlight. He’s out of incense. He’s afraid he’s out of
ideas. He walks to the kitchen, turns on a light, changes his mind and
turns it off again. He makes the coffee by moonlight, steel strings still
ringing in the next room, where he has left his head, thinking in threes and
contemplating the Raga Of The Harvest Moon while the moon, still, still shines
on the keyboard.
This is how it is for him in the morning, every
morning, early, and even sometimes all morning long: long before even the first
cup of coffee, the first thought repeating, repeated in the moonlight, repeated
at the keyboard, repeated at the keyboard in the moonlight. This is how he is.
absolute
perfect moon
coffee moon
keyboard moon raga moon
haiku moon,
release me