One more burst of color...

to relieve the restlessness of one's heart.

Sarah Moon

All the Difficult Hours and Minutes

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

All the difficult hours and minutes

are like salted plums in a jar.

Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,

they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass.

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

Sarah Moon for Grey Magazine

Because I want a little color,
sometimes I just need it.
This appeals to my girlish nature
and my love for Sarah Moon.

resurrection of a poem fragment

"Of human deeds divine in all but name,

Was it not worth a little hour or more

To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came

To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be

You love not me?" --Thomas Hardy

Sarah Moon

The Inventory of Goodbye

The Inventory Of Goodbye by Anne Sexton


I have a pack of letters,
I have a pack of memories.
I could cut out the eyes of both.
I could wear them like a patchwork apron.
I could stick them in the washer, the drier,
and maybe some of the pain would float off like dirt?
Perhaps down the disposal I could grind up the loss.
Besides -- what a bargain -- no expensive phone calls.
No lengthy trips on planes in the fog.
No manicky laughter or blessing from an odd-lot priest.
That priest is probably still floating on a fog pillow.
Blessing us. Blessing us.

Am I to bless the lost you,
sitting here with my clumsy soul?
Propaganda time is over.
I sit here on the spike of truth.
No one to hate except the slim fish of memory
that slides in and out of my brain.
No one to hate except the acute feel of my nightgown
brushing my body like a light that has gone out.
It recalls the kiss we invented, tongues like poems,
meeting, returning, inviting, causing a fever of need.
Laughter, maps, cassettes, touch singing its path -
all to be broken and laid away in a tight strongbox.
The monotonous dead clog me up and there is only
black done in black that oozes from the strongbox.
I must disembowel it and then set the heart, the legs,
of two who were one upon a large woodpile
and ignite, as I was once ignited, and let it whirl
into flame, reaching the sky
making it dangerous with its red.

Photograph by Sarah Moon

counters and clocks

no fragments left of me

but

to feel you near

was 

everything

Sarah Moon

Blues for Almost Forgotten Music

"I am trying to remember the lyrics of old songs

                                                            I’ve forgotten, mostly

I am trying to remember one-hit wonders, hymns,

                                              and musicals like West Side Story.

Singing over and over what I can recall, I hum remnants on

                                                             buses and in the car.

 

I am so often alone these days with echoes of these old songs

                                                          and my ghosted lovers.

I am so often alone that I can almost hear it, can almost feel

                                                        the half-touch of others,

can almost taste the licked clean spine of the melody I’ve lost.

 

I remember the records rubbed with static and the needle

                                                                     gathering dust.

I remember the taste of a mouth so sudden and still cold from

                                                                         wintry gusts.

It seemed incredible then — a favorite song, a love found.

                                                                It wasn't, after all.

 

Days later, while vacuuming, the lyrics come without thinking.

Days later, I think I see my old lover in a café but don’t,

                                                                        how pleasing

it was to think it was him, to finally sing that song.

 

This is the way of all amplitude: we need the brightness

                                                                         to die some.

This is the way of love and music: it plays like a god and

                                                                       then is done.

Do I feel better remembering, knowing for certain

                                                                       what’s gone?"

 

By Roxane Beth Johnson

Photography by Sarah Moon.

Evolution of a Blue Line

"Half the hour is a moment filled with snow that is not there and whose absence leaves the smell of oranges where oranges have never been, and the other half is an afternoon of bones piled like firelogs every twenty feet in a pasture of tall grass, welded grains and mumblings imagine.

Were it not for a fence of milk and wire, this would be the neighborhood of the world.  In a distance the word is mistaken for a mountain but is only a bottle on a fence post gathering the image of the pasture.  The chicken scratch on the edifice shimmers, a bar of colored light behind the white shade, it has a family of wishes to lift."

Photography by Sarah Moon and text by George Angel from Evolution of a Blue Line - the fifth Season.

Sarah Moon - Photographer

 
 




"I start from nothing, I make up a story which I leave untold.  I imagine a station which doesn't exist.  I wipe out a space to invent another.  I ship the light I rent everything unreal and then I cry."