After the lunar eclipse earlier this month and my moon pictures last week, this heavenly object has been on my mind. Because of this, I was delighted to find Colm Tóibín’s “Mysterium Lunae” on The Atlantic this weekend, which addresses a different aspect of the moon.
Though published back in April, I found it at just the right moment to inspire my writing practice. Read, enjoy, be inspired!
Mysterium Lunae
Last night
I saw that the moon
Was empty in the sky.
The stars around did
What they do.
They are
Millions of miles
Away,
Or millions of years,
And are totally exhausted.
But the moon is blank,
Just a space to show
Where it might have
Been. We will tell
Whoever will attend
That the moon used to catch
Light from the sun
And waxed and waned:
Full, sickle, half-
Moon. And the songs:
“Blue Moon,” “Song to the Moon”
(From Rusalka),
“Moon River,” The Dark
Side of the Moon,
The Moon and the Melodies.
It was all the rage, once,
The moon.
It was a large step,
A sad step,
For mankind.
Soon, the sun will run
Out of hydrogen
And it will all
Be gone.
The disappearance
Of the moon
Is just the start.
I am working day and night
On my book,
Knowing it will
Be the final word
On the matter.
I will compose,
With aid from scientists,
A description in concise
Prose, of the time before the bang,
The gorgeous vacancy,
The pre-astral soup,
Gravity dancing like
A herring
On the griddle—oh,
And the sly almostness
Of atoms and particles,
And how long a neutron
Took to be certain
That it was not a proton,
And the war
Between infinity and
Eternity that would have
Gone on forever
Had the world,
Oozing immanence,
Not begun to roll,
With its built-in
Obsolescence,
Its sell-by date,
Its oomph, its ooh-la-la,
Its everything that
Is the case.
It is calm here
Now. Waves have
Stopped, of course.
The sea has settled
Down; soon it will
Be a flyover state.
There is
Nothing to compel
Its tides.
At gatherings, they read
Matthew Arnold’s poem
And marvel
At the lines about the
Sea being calm tonight.
What else is there?
But it wasn’t always calm.
I can swear to that.
I remember
Redondo Beach
And the waves high
And the sun
Going down
Over the horizon.
Strange, I have
No memory of the moon.
But it must have been there
Somewhere.
But, no matter what, you can
Look all you want—
The moon is in the past,
Like analogue,
Or the Western Seaboard,
Or the library at Alexandria,
Or sic transit gloria
Mundi, a lovely
Old saying
Long eclipsed
By more fashionable
Tongues that yet are
Speechless at
The vacancy
In the night sky.
They are
Howling at the
Thing not there,
That we want back
Now, or at least
Soon.
About the poet:
Colm Tóibín is an Irish-born novelist and is currently Mellon Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and Chancellor of Liverpool University. His first poetry collection, Vinegar Hill, came out earlier this year.
Read any new poems lately? Share a link in the comments or message me directly!
Happy writing!
