...Moon...
By the time grandma covered
the bedtime story,
the sheets felt warm,
just right for sleeping.
She ended the story
the same way she always did,
standing at the doorway,
saying, "Know how much I love you?
From here to the moon."
Years later,
when she had a stroke of genius,
at a doorway
ending the story
(this time lying on cold tile),
she said the only word
she could get out -
"moon".
Just right for living.
Looking back, hearing her last word,
he feels warm again.
© 2009 Darrell Moneyhon
I heard this story. I
identified with
it. It
haunted me, hunted me,
camouflaged as a story.
But it was a wholesome hunter,
a kind of holy ghost hunter
whose weapon of choice
is a cross
bow strung with the specter
of the unknown, yet committed to
this, this
whatever
it is. It is
a matter of hunting from a blind
for something beyond.
There is a story,
if that is all
you let it be.
It can be more
if you seek something
more, more
or less let it seek you.
This is behind the scenes stuff.
It is not the stuff of poetry.
It is step-by-step preparation,
like buckling up a boot,
like setting up a blind,
and sitting up there, waiting
until the story finally comes around,
out of the wild.
On the first day of deer season,
a young man headed
to a Pennsylvania convenient mart
early in the morning, at
four something, for something
to eat through the day
while he watched for deer.
On the way to the store
(one of those all night and all day
gas station stores), driving his vehicle
(I never heard what kind. Was it an Impala?
More likely a Cherokee
or an F-150, or an S-10; no matter,
it was the vehicle he chose,
on the path he chose.), a big buck
appeared out of nowhere
and crashed through the windshield
before the young man
had a chance
to spot him or aim or count the points.
The two of them died on that road,
leaving everyone
wondering which
was the hunter
and which the hunted?
Irony at times seems gruesome,
tempting a cruel perception
of poetic justice, like some Edgar Allen Poe
poem, in which a young man
full of dreams,
who, due
to a lust for dreams,
is impaled
by the very racks he longed for.
This is a very dark version of a very strange story.
There is another story
wrapped around the same facts,
wrapped around the driver,
and run through him,
having shattered the standard view.
It is a story of grace, of the
lithe crossing of life
paths, of sections of life
intersecting,
of the ghostly thing you look forward to,
finding you so brilliantly
that it is as if it is
the essence, the holy ghost, of yourself
finding you. Wham!
In this story, hunter and hunted are not at all
at odds, but in a sacred coming together,
out of doing what they were most called to do,
to be, to see
out from the blind.
In this story, there is no distance
between the young man, his last breath,
and the breathless anticipation of the listener
as he or she hears the story,
or sees it in the mind,
out from the blind
of mere plots plodding along
without intersecting themes.
In this story, you live like Tristen
lived in Legends of the Fall,
committing wholly to your truest path,
hunted by that holy ghost
who helps you, as the young man in the story,
“die a good death”.
© 2008 Darrell Moneyhon
Here is another poem, hot off the presses, written just today, 12/11/08. It seems to have some of the reader self-referential qualities as Being Found by Yourself... Having the reader refer to his or her own mind or own attention is a kind of Gestalt therapy technique I have started putting in the poem.
Layers, Liars, and Lairs
OJ Simpson surfaced
from his legal (and life's) inundation,
on a spot not quite beyond the shadows
of murderous doubt.
If, in fact, he did what he was accused of doing,
is who he is that act?
Is he that rage which must have overcome him?
Or that calculation which must have
possessed him as he possessed
the where-with-all to use it?
Cutting off a life brings countless tears,
ripple effects of victimization.
But the onion cut of life,
exposing a layer of rage under the calculation,
and a layer of fear (of inadequacy, lack of control,
or hurt) under that,
also brings us to tears. To think,
a man like that may have a hurt little boy
below several surfaces. Well,
it's enough to make a grown man cry;
enough to bring retribution to it's knees,
to prayers of solace and healing.
The guilt of a man is not a single dimension.
The life of a man isn't cut
and dry. It is moist with deep layers,
slippery as the weird and colorful fish
in the oceanic mind.
Oh, if in fact
he did it, he lied
while tried; the big oath,
that ogre called integrity,
broken on the stand.
Where do all the lies room and board
in this old world? In the heart
of a man and woman?
Or in hearts surfing mere surfaces,
tossed and lost at see, at the appearances
of things. Things like that over there
(it is a mere distraction, and nothing to do
with this poem); it is a lie
simply lying there to take us away
from pungent meanings that might have been
peeled out from the onion.
It is easier than crying. Sometimes
the deception is so great
that we take it as truth,
and interpret the whole poem in terms of it -
of it's apparent nature,
whatever it is, or for that matter,
what "is is".
'Home is where the heart is."
That's what they say. Wait now,
isn't the heart
where the home is? A place
that brings out whatever creation
is to be dreamed? A man can get lost
in a good book, and he is often found
in a good woman.
But if his beauty (the beauty he seeks)
is only skin deep, he is lost
in a good woman.
No feminine touch can nurture
his heart into its fullest fruition -
he is trapped, convicted
toward the lesser thing.
OJ was convicted by exoneration
from the deep ("so help me God") truth,
if, in fact, he did what he was
accused of doing.
The little boy inside
is home alone.
© 2008 Darrell Moneyhon
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