To the Moon

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I.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

II.

Thou chosen sister of the spirit,
That gazes on thee till in thee it pities …


- “To The Moon” (1820) by Percy Bysshe Shelley



I remember that second-story window, my chin on the sill, spying down upon the gently up-sloping fields, cresting up to the dark formless perimeter of pine trees. Scattered about were tangles of brush, long grasses green and gray in the night, illuminated only by the bright lamp of the Adirondack moon. Leafless saplings swayed in the soundless breeze, a hint of motion against the distant murky cloudline. A lonely tree – oak? dogwood? I never knew – raising its arms up towards the thin stratosphere; was it watching me watching it or was it oblivious, seeking out summation to its own dark and ill-formed strivings? Was it the only breaker the old house had against the wilderness, the wild at the edge of my vision, a cold row of fir-girded pines at the outer edge of our etched-away oasis of civilization?

And all under the all-seeing joyless eye of the spiraling moon …