Watching the Moon

Watching moon slowly track across night sky, it’s face in the branches of my tree, reaching up to entangle it in, the moon tries to shine it’s light so bright, it won’t be tangled anymore, but instead it makes it sit deeper in the branches. It tracks across the winter night. My foot on the snowy sidewalk sinks deeper. A shovel abandoned at the edge of a driveway, its edge up, glinting in the moonlight that is stuck in the branches of my tree, the moon is half cocked, sitting up so that the night can fill it up with darkness. A light in the bush. The chrome of the car in the street. I want to write whatever comes into my head, but there is so much shit in my head right now getting in the way of good writing. The winter is cold and I hate it. I hate living here right now. Michigan. I want to be in another time or place, and I should pay attention to this, because this is a theme in my journals. When I have been unhappy in the past, I wish myself away someplace new.

Anywhere right now? Where would it be? Even though I hate the cold right now, cold seems appropriate. I could be in Scotland, in a big old castle. A small B&B, a fire in the hearth. A cup of warm tea. A book. Quiet music, the same moon, glowering outside my window, telling me to go to bed. That he will take over watching the night now. I don’t believe him so I stay up and compete and dream under my duvet in the Scottish bed of other places I’d like to be. Outside next to a fire in northern Finland, reindeer somewhere behind snorting, I can see their puffs of white air reflected by the moon, who is still telling me to go bed. That he wants night to himself, that my awakeness is bothering his solitary look at the night, I’m seeing things he doesn’t want to share, like the small white in the rabbit eye as she stands up tall in the snow. My Finnish self wants to be someplace else also, like in a small village in France, outside a small pub after drinking wine all night and now will be walking home. This self rubs her hands together to get warm, sits on a low stone wall in the middle of the square, the stone wall holding fountain together, and the moon is brightest here, refracted into 10,000 pieces and this girl on the stone wall thinks that is right, the moon like her many selves in many places. She can hear the staff in the pub, sweeping the floor, yelling at each in gallic ribbing, the moon whispers to her from the fountain, go home, go to bed, but the girl can’t get off the wall. Dips her hand into the fountain, to keep the moon separate, not together, but she looks up, and there is the half moon telling her, I am like you right now, in half, not ten thousand pieces, just go home. Get whole again. But the girl, she thinks of sleeping in her Michigan bed, flannel sheets safe and duvet and slippers and she can’t get off the wall. She can’t get off the wall. She can’t get off the wall.