Music and Poetry
NIGHT OF THE THIRTEENTH
It is the night of the thirteenth full moon.
It is the longest night of the year.
Moonlight shines on tenement windows.
Moonlight shines on ice.
The night is cold and still, the moon, a looking glass.
It is the night of the thirteenth full moon,
the first night of winter.
There are Christmas lights on a fire escape.
There is barbed wire around a window ledge.
The moon is wreathed in mother-of-pearl plumes.
It is the night on the thirteenth full moon.
We have been watching for centuries.
Cro-Magnon Man scratched rocks
with symbols charting phases of the moon.
She is the goddess of the hunt.
She is the guide to planting.
The moon has footprints on her face.
It is the night of the thirteenth full moon.
It is Sunday.
There is a nativity scene
in a used furniture store.
The streets are quiet.
The only sound comes from a basement,
an old man shouting, “Jesus, sweet Jesus...”
over and over.
The moon is a four billion year old
chunk of stone.
It is the night of the thirteenth full moon,
a night of worship and drunkenness.
The moon is high between dark buildings.
Street light intrudes into the alley.
I stand on a wall tossing pebbles
at the moonlit window of a friend.
There is no answer.
Larry C. Simpson c 1999
click to hear Night of the 13th Moon
ARRIBADA
They seem drawn to the beach
like sea turtles that struggle ashore to lay eggs
by the lemon light of the rising moon.
These pregnant women, each from diverse places,
distant lives, now share a common state.
They wade in the roil, hands on hips,
comparing due-dates,
laughing about little kicks inside their bellies.
One lies on a towel allowing her mate
to rub oil into her mammalian skin,
massaging the soft mound
that has become a living nest.
A sea within a web of blood carries
this projection of braided chromosomes,
a sleeping creature, already loved.
2
When the mother turtle
finds her way to shore
from some unknown ocean reach,
alone but with a thousand more,
she pulls herself above the highest tide
to dig a nest with clumsy dorsal feet.
Stone faced, she strains to release
each leathery bubble of life
until she has filled the hole with hope
of future progeny.
Her only signs of relief or agony
are rhythmic hissing sighs and tears
that fill her eyes like minute seas.
Quickly she buries her eggs
with desperate kicks of flippered legs.
Then, with full weight of her shell,
she drops herself to tamp the mound of sand
and exhausted , pulls herself back to the sea,
swimming far from land,
leaving her treasure to months
of sun and storm and chance.
3
A mother stands
in the rushing froth
letting the sea suck sand from her toes.
Watching a tongue of foam flow back and forth,
she poses for a photograph.
A husband wipes salt water from his eyes
to get a better look at his swimming son.
One child gathers shells.
Another throws scraps of bread
to the gulls that swarm and cry
plucking food from the air
like swift white fingers of the sun.
A woman lies back in the waves with arms out straight
letting the sea fill her hair and take her weight.
The surf hushes her worries of motherhood.
For a moment she floats
in a saline womb
like the child she carries into her dreams.
She feels the swells,
the lull of a hidden moon
dissolving her cares in a flood of tranquility.
She drifts like a water-borne bloom.
4
On a remote beach,
vacant of hotels,
where scavengers have not dug for eggs,
neither humans nor dogs have ripped
apart the shells,
there comes a time
when the sand simmers with reptilian lives.
Already sensing the direction of the waves,
the turtle young fight their way from the eggs
to rush for their first taste of the sea.
But frigate birds shadow the turtle brood.
They circle, dive,
snatching an easy harvest,
abundant food emerging from the nests.
Ghost crabs wait near the edge of tide
to catch hatchlings with precise pincers,
another step on the pyramid of protean.
Some turtles find refuge
in the hungry womb of ocean
to flee groupers and sharks or other predators,
perhaps to return one year to this same beach.
So it is and has been
for ten million years or more.
5
A woman and man
slip alone from their room
for an evening walk among the dunes.
Like a golden turtle,
the moon emerges from the waves
sending yellow ripples to ride the swells.
But the man and woman do not think of turtles
or eggs or endangered species
any more than they think of the submarines
that haunt the seas
or the guided missiles
perched like predatory birds around the world.
Their thoughts lie in a closer closer orbit
of a child-to-be.
With fear and worry and pride for this woman
who carries the culmination
of his life inside her abdomen,
the man is relieved to lose his thoughts
to the whisper and thunder of the ocean.
The woman is a sponge of sensations,
a vessel overflowing with care, emotion.
They hold hands and watch the moon
climb into rolling clouds.
Their hands find places of shared secrets,
the warm reunion of excited flesh.
They kiss.
They swim in moonlight on a towel
tasting sea in merging sweat.
Two becoming three, as one, they embrace.
They burrow into mutual tenderness
to create a single egg of faith.
And when the surging tide carries their hearts
higher than their minds, they lie back in sand
until they again can see the stars,
feeling the peace that follows passion,
peace that overcomes
their private wars.
THE FLIP
Toes
holding
back
at the edge,
the board
quakes beneath
determined feet
and nervous legs.
A girl of thirteen
shakes her head
with a carefree nod.
Her long hair flings
glittering drops.
She straightens her suit,
wrinkles her lip,
leans slightly,
bounces to an arc,
tucks and flips.
She surrenders herself
to centrifugal force,
an instant’s weightless wait.
Extending arms and legs,
she meets the surface
as if to embrace
that other
child or woman
in her reflection,
face
to face.
C 1997 Larry Simpson
Ms. M.
If you
had lived,
you might not
have become
a myth.
Death left you the gift
of ageless grace, a kiss
on film, a mystery
on screen and page,
an afterimage,
but more
an aftertaste.
I still remember
your silken skin
in a photograph
my friend and I found
in trash at a barber shop.
We were small boys then
and blushed at the thought
of a woman so exposed,
your knowing smile,
your willing pose.
So much skin
held a power
we did not
understand.
We tore
the photo
into bits.
We dug a hole
and hid the scraps
beneath a rock.
We said a prayer
and forty years ago tried to forget.