MOON and water
COLLABORATION/OFFERING no. 246
January 23, 2021
I have had a hard time of late meeting the daily deadline Louise and I had been so good at adhering to through these months of the pandemic. She has always been there on Messenger, bright and early, with a quote and also, a clear sense of how she is on any given day, and more impressive still, what she hopes to achieve with each new day.
Her choice of this poem, by Mary Oliver, surprised me. It is Oliver-like, and yet in other ways, isn’t. Nature is evoked, as is so often the case in Mary Oliver’s poetry, but I feel that this poem is full of feminine mystery. Women are, we are, Louise and I, connected to the rhythms of the moon. The first 5 lines of “Moon and Water” are a plunge into to the past two decades of my life…up early, awake in the dark, often finding the company of the moon. And of course, we are all made in the warmth of dark water…
Merci Louise.
LA CITATION:
Moon and Water, BY MARY OLIVER
I wake and spend
the last hours
of darkness
with no one
but the moon.
She listens
to my complaints
like the good
companion she is
and comforts me surely
with her light.
But she, like everyone,
has her own life.
So finally I understand
that she has turned away,
is no longer listening.
She wants me
to refold myself
into my own life.
And, bending close,
as we all dream of doing,
she rows with her white arms
through the dark water
which she adores.
ART:
- Landscape by Night, Theodore Fielding (1746/1747- 1819)
- Cregennan lake by Moonlight, Christopher Williams, (1873-1934)
- Moonbeams, Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919)
