Memoir, Moon

I was born with too much you in me,

thirty-six hours in labor and still she

tried to hold on for

  four or

    more,

but I spilled onto the midday floor—

Sun on the meridian and Cancer's twenty-ninth degree.

you had just passed over and through

  a moment in the year, one of two,

  when Sun becomes obscured by you,

granting your kiss on my nativity

that much more potency.

she saw in you a curse to carry,

and me, I saw what she would see,

I was all wrong to pour

entire oceans with no sense of decorum.

it's true, I resented our sensitivity,

and that her self-fulfilling prophecy

was to brace against who I turned out to be: everly

    waxing and

  waning

on finite stores of energy

expended all too rapidly outdoors,

climbing arms of friendly sycamores

or the rooted hills of redwood trees.

with your loomlight mooning over me

  I was

    tired

even when little had transpired,

from bathing in foreign energies,

not the kind that lives in batteries

but the kind, sometimes,

i'd mistake for mine—

  like your light, you know?

the way you emit no glow of your own,

and once a month, don't you disappear

just to finally feel at home?

.

I didn't value the generativity

I found early on in artistry

because no one applauds what's done alone

in my room, sibling giggles and groans

slipping under the door

clashing with the click-clack of my keyboard,

but when my age hit

  double-digits,

  I started to get it—

you made the night for poets and troubadours.

still I'd swear us both to secrecy,

wasn't I awkward to spend all that free

time indoors, pouring over metaphors

picking at the open sore

of heart-bleeding creativity?

indulgent, too,

all the ways and frames from which

I made sense of me through you.

.

and surely you remember teens,

the hormonal frenzy of my early bleed,

trading yours for a man's mirror.

Neptune's would've been clearer

  or at least made less a monster

  of my birthmarked lunacy.

Introspection and piercing empathy

were no prizes in the dating scene,

I learned men liked women like mom

    cool, aloof,

  headstrong,

that you were my most irksome quality,

and well into my twenties,

each time a mirror chose to leave,

citing our ill-fitting personalities

I understood his words to mean

"you're too much of the Moon for me."

.

but did you see,

I stepped down from that

  merry

    go

  round

the night you bloomed cherry blossom pink?

my heart: electric carnival of grief

drank from you then, greedily

  sunk to the nadir

  where despair finally sears

to honeycomb: sticky, golden, sweet.

"I'm too much of the Moon!" I shrieked,

from the rawness of self-honesty

  came roiling, ecstatic glee

this depth of feeling? a felicity!

with all of you poured into me,

I never had the barren opportunity

  to numb, or hide

    from tides

that swell into this oceanic symphony

of feeling most alive.