Danny’s Song to the Moon
O lady moon, up there in the sky,
Won’t you come down from your home so high?
Won’t you come down?
If you come down before I die,
I’ll give you rye whiskey and a slice of apple pie.
With a whang dang doodle dang dee.
Visitors in the Night
Past the shagbark hickory with the bird feeder shaped like a little house, past the wild cherry and the Japanese maple, along the fence with its three tall pussy willows and nine forsythias, down the row of zinnias at the edge of the vegetable garden, then along the latticework bottom of the back porch, past the garbage can, and up past the shagbark hickory with the bird feeder: so walks the woman who lives alone, on this summer night. She is wearing a pink summer bathrobe over her blue nightgown and she has placed a yellow zinnia in her hair. The grass is cool and soft on her bare feet, with hardness pushing up just underneath, but best of all are the round green hickory fruits that feel like little apples against her soles. In sunlight they look like tiny green pumpkins. The moonlight casts sharp shadows. She can see the long shadow of the bird feeder, like a witch’s hat, the shadow-branches of the wild cherry, shadows of tomato sticks in the garden, her own long shadow rippling over grass. When she was a girl she had tea parties with her dolls under the summer moon, of course that was a long time ago. And suddenly she can’t be sure. Would she have been allowed to do that? She remembers playing Statue, whirling round and round, falling in the green grass, one leg stuck up: don’t move. She closes her eyes and begins to turn, holding out her arms, quickly she opens her eyes and looks around. It isn’t at all the proper thing to do. What if someone’s watching? And now she has spoiled it, it’s time to go indoors: even a woman who lives alone must sleep, you know. She passes around the yard once more, climbs the steps of the back porch, enters through the kitchen door. There is bright moonlight in the kitchen. She passes into the darker living room and sees girls in the chairs. They have come to visit her, in the night. They are wearing black masks, they are rising like birds.
“Oh don’t go,” she cries, clasping her hands to her throat. “This is such a surprise. Won’t you have some lemonade? Please. Please stay. This is such a nice surprise.”
Kisses
He is kissing her hands, he is touching her face, the handsome one, the heartbreaker. In the blue summer night he burst through the hedge into her back yard. As he kisses her hands, as he touches her face, under the spruces—the smell of the spruces!—she remembers herself up in her room, behind the window, in some other life. He has broken the spell, released her into the night. He is kissing her hands, he is kissing her face. She can’t see him now, he’s all touch, the sly one, the heartstealer. Handsome is as handsome does. Who said that? Her mother said that. Oh what does it mean? Tell me what it means! He is kissing her mouth, slow nibbling kisses, kissable kisses. Nibble nibble little mouse. Who’s that nibbling at my house? She is kissing his mouth, she is kissing his kisses. Kiss kiss. Oh yes. Yes yes. She is cracking apart. Flowers are bursting from her eyes. The night is making her insane. Why her? Why him? Steady, girl. Get a grip on yourself. She’s seen it all a hundred times on TV, ho hum: good-looking guy, the fatal kiss, sorrow in suburbia. Her stupid hair! Touching her, kissing her. Who is he? Who? He is the night, he is what is. Bringer of night, spellbreaker, kiss-bringer, heartwringer. And she has the funny feeling that he’s brought to her, right there in his pocket, all of the warm blue summer night: here, watch this: and with a toss of his hand, look!—the white moon, the blue sky, the rope swing, the smell of the spruces. He is kissing her mouth, she is falling into his mouth, she’s feeling a little crazy, oh that’s all right.
The Comb
Behind the athletic field at the back of the junior high, the man with shiny black hair stands in the shadow of the bleachers. He is waiting for the girl in skintight jeans to emerge from the thicket. Thirteen minutes have passed and she is still in there. From his height at the back of the bleachers he commands a view of the moonwashed slope leading down to the trees and of the field stretching away beyond them to the back of Denner’s Autobody. He has watched her walk into the trees and cannot understand what is delaying her. Is it possible that she? In there? Unzipping. Tugging. Crouching down: no one to see her. Dark. He steps out of blackness into brilliant moonlight and sees his shadow flung out in front of him like a spear. He hesitates and steps back. The light is not nice. From the pocket of his pants he takes out a silver comb and begins to comb his hair, following each stroke with a smoothing motion of his other hand.
Coop Along the Railroad Tracks
Coop takes his own sweet time walking home along the alley between the storebacks and the railway embankment. He likes it back here, in no man’s land, the stores in black shadow, embankment in bright moonlight. He’s had six beers, maybe seven, eight at the most, nothing to write home about. Black iron gantries rise up over the tracks and look like black bridges against the sky. They’re hung with power lines that glint in the moonlight. The streetlights back here are the old kind, the color of car headlights, not yet replaced by the new ones he’s never liked, Kool-Aid orange. Fancy kind of name, chemical: boron, radon, tip of his tongue. In high school he used to walk the alley on hot summer nights, looking for girls, looking for trouble. Now he walks carefully, taking in the details. His vision of the mannequin moving in the window still shakes him and he wants to hold the world in place. Big metal garbage cans stand against the backs of the stores. Shadowy pipes and fat gas meters poke out of the walls near the ground. Now and then a space between stores opens up, giving a glimpse of lit-up store windows on the other side of Main Street. Barium-sulfur? On the bright side of the alley, staghorn sumac and tilted ailanthus trees grow among the stones on the embankment, up to the chainlink fence. Sodium-vapor: that’s it. Coop passes the side of an iron gantry with a sign reading DANGER: LIVE WIRE. Beside the words is the drawing of a zigzag flash of lightning. Moonlight glitters on the brown glass insulators on the crossbars at the top. Trains in the night, the bright yellow windows, people going places, sharp-dressed women leaning back with half-closed eyes. Howl of the train whistle making your blood jump. Coop works in a body shop, hammering out dents and painting out rust. He does a little business on the side, restoring engines in the garage he shares with the noisy family living over him. The work tires him out; he wonders what else he might be doing. Summer after high school he drove a van for a moving company, nearly threw his back out. He needs a lucky break. There’s a guy coming over tomorrow to pick up a Chevy that Coop hasn’t even looked at yet. He needs his own business. He needs money in the bank. He’s as fucking good as anybody else. He just needs a break. Just a little of the ready and in two three years he’ll be living on Easy Street. Made in the shade. Way to go, Bill baby. William Cooper, 32 Easy Street, Dreamville, The Moon. Mr. William Cooper and Mrs. Isabel Amanda Cooper, formerly a mannequin, invite you to a dance party on Whitelawn Avenue, Moonhaven, Connecticut. Come as you aren’t. Girls in white dresses dancing. In the fifth grade he had a pretty teacher called Miss Winterbottom and he spent the whole year thinking about her snowy white bottom. Coop looks up at the moon and it seems cold and far away. He stumbles and almost falls. He’s breathing hard, his mind is turning. Eight beers was it, maybe nine. He remembers the old roller coaster, before it burned down. You could see it at night from the beach, hear the screams across the water. Girls in the cars, the first plunge, loving it. Carefully he crosses the alley and sits down against the back of a store between a garbage can and a gas meter. The crickets are going full tilt. He swears she moved in the window. On Main a car with the window down belts rock music into the night air and vanishes into some world of silence. Kids, summer, the smell of leather baseball gloves, the lazy good times: all gone. Gone the pretty girls in high school hallways, gone the quick smiles, the easy laughter. Summer nights sitting on the porch with Maureen O’Donnell, the creak of wicker, the clean
smell of her skin. Only at night does it sometimes come back, the old feeling. Give me! Give! He’ll check tomorrow, make sure she’s there.
Chorus of Night Voices
Gone the pretty girls in high school hallways Gone the white blouses, the laughter in back yards Gone the night spins on the thruway in summer Gone the old roller coaster, the prancing horses
Pierrot and Columbine
Released from the rigor of a single heartbroken attitude, Pierrot feels himself expanding into a multitude of melancholy poses, which will permit him to express the full poetry of his spurned and hopeless devotion. His Columbine, confined though she is to one unvarying expression of disdain, is so lovely that he wishes to fall continually at her feet in attitudes of adoration and ruin. But now, under the melting power of the moon, she has been set free to explore a rich repertoire of dismissive looks—the mocking, the bitter, the cruel, the reproachful, the laughing, the petulant, the defiant, the bored—accompanied by gestures eloquent with lofty indifference and delicate ennui. She is so beautiful in her refusals, so desirable in her moody fits and coy disdains, that Pierrot, even as he assumes a posture of despair, can long only to be provoked by her into yet more expressive revelations of humiliating and spirit-crushing desire; and as she sits cross-legged on the sill of the screened attic window, swinging one calf and gazing out with a bored demeanor at the nearly full moon, Pierrot catches her eye and in an instant, before she is able to glance wearily away, falls to his knees, holds out both arms, and bows his head gracefully in the attitude of one slain by love.
Haverstraw in Moonlight
Haverstraw, unconsoled, takes the long way home. High under one arm he hugs a copy of Jennie Gerhardt, a book Mrs. Kasco has pressed on him, a book he isn’t in the mood to read. Ever since he’s known her she has lent him books, books that are supposed to increase his social consciousness. He squeezes the book against his side and walks on. He knows every road in this weary old dreary old town, knows the sites of Indian settlements, the seventeenth-century farms, the route the British took, shooting and burning, in 1779. He’d like to wipe it all out, start things over again, give the land back to the Indians. Or better yet, give it to him, to Haverstraw, King of the New World: trapper, hunter, fisher, farmer, sower of appleseed, stargazer, trailblazer, pathfinder, deerslayer, barefoot boy with cheek of tan, Huck Finn on the Housatonic, crackerbarrel philosopher, wily old coot in a coonskin cap, shrewd-eyed Yankee, inventor of the cotton gin, the printing press, the typewriter, founder of libraries, distributor of American jeans to the Indians, self-made tycoon in a thirty-room mansion, a hometown boy, worked his way up, one in a million, a lone ranger, a wayfaring stranger, a born loser, a man down on his luck. Haverstraw, sighing aloud, is startled by the sound. Soon he’ll be muttering to himself, a spiteful old man without teeth. Chin-dribbler, slobberer. He is thirty-nine years old, a grown man living with his mother. He will never finish his book. Oh, a night of illuminations! Luminous moon, shine down on me! He is a failure. He ought to go out and get a job. You said it, buster. He repeats the litany of the jobs of his twenties: dishwasher at Sal’s Home Cookin’, short-order cook at Greasy Joe’s, night clerk at the Cozy Moon Motel, bushtrimmer, leafraker, housepainter, waspkiller, driveway sealer, roof-gutter cleaner, private secretary to a retired professor writing a book on the teaching of mathematics in elementary school, delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant, attendant at a canoe-rental service at Lake Quinnetuck, actor (spook) for a Halloween hayride. Thirty-nine years old and nothing to show for it. Living off your mother, are you? Still stuck in the house he was born in. Oh, put a lid on it. Old, he’s growing old. He can remember when mailboxes were olive green, stop signs yellow. Thirty-nine years old. He doesn’t ask for much. A room, a pencil, a can of chicken soup. Ah, wilderness! A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and forty thou. Grown-up men have money in the bank, mortgages, kids, wives, watchbands. What then am I? Haverstraw begins to enjoy it: I am a thirty-nine-year-old failure. I have based my life on a delusion. He is lost, lost—lost in the woods of himself—tangled up in his own undergrowth. No stars above: all dark. Grow up! Give it up! Haverstraw sighs again. Leave me be. He needs succor, heart shelter. Comfort me, night. Soothe me, old moon. The moon has betrayed him. Night has betrayed him. The night is nothing but a darker day. Haverstraw looks up, shakes his fist at the sky. He hates these streets, these smug houses. He decides to leave the beaten track, head home a wilder way. He can cut across the field in back of the junior high, pass through the trees, disappear for a while from the face of the earth.
Chorus of Night Voices
Hail, goddess, bright one, shining one: release him from confusion. Lighten his burden, banish his darkness: teach the sleeping heart to wake. Hail, goddess, night-enchantress: show the lost one the way.
The Children Enter the Woods
Across moonlit back yards, under green badminton nets stretched between red-black metal poles, past sandboxes where yellow dump trucks cast long pointy shadows, under the spaces in white-flowering hedges, over lines of green-black hose attached to turned-off lawn sprinklers, around the corners of garages, past forgotten blue water pistols and jump ropes with red wooden handles, the children make their way toward the north part of town. There the streets become winding country lanes with a double yellow line down the center, bordered by short wooden posts with red reflectors. An occasional dead possum with a long pink tail lies at the side of the road. The music is louder now, more insistent. The children step over the thick twists of steel cable joining the brown posts and enter the woods. The ground crackles with pine cones and old leaves. Spots of moonlight lie on the tree branches and the forest floor. Sometimes the children stop, startled by a sound—a rabbit, maybe, or a raccoon—before continuing on their way. Can there be tigers in the woods? The music grows louder, clearer. Under the branches the children can feel the dark flute-notes streaming against them, caressing their skin.
Danny and the Goddess
On this clear summer night in southern Connecticut, the moon goddess sits on her throne. From her high seat she looks down on chimneys and rooftops, on the crossarms of telephone poles studded with glass insulators, on trucks rolling along the thruway. She looks down on gas tanks and water towers, on dark, small waves in Long Island Sound, on railroad tracks and white picket fences, on lifeguard chairs and sugar maples, on limestone quarries and pinewoods and the chutes of concrete plants, on high-voltage lines strung between steel pylons, on winding country lanes with a double yellow line down the center, on the individual winged fruits of a Norway maple on a quiet suburban street, on Danny lying asleep in his back yard between the clothesline and the garage. The lovely boy lies with his arms outspread and his face turned slightly to one side. The skin of his cheeks is smooth. Small blond hairs shimmer beneath his short dark sideburns and on the edges of his upper lip. Now the goddess mounts her silver chariot behind four milk-white steeds, now she plunges through the night sky like a shooting star, her hair bright-streaming in the wind. Now the shining one swings down from her chariot and strides across the grass to where the lovely boy lies sleeping. Deep-smitten she looks at him, mortal and beautiful, young and dying. She sinks to her knees and caresses the fair face, peaceful in sleep. Never will she wake him, the sleep-enchanted: she will bind him in dream. Gently she undresses him, unclasps her mantle. Now she strokes the skin of the sleeping one, now she kisses his eyelids closed in dream, now she stiffens his lovelance with her hand. Now she rides him, the goddess astride him, takes him, the night-lovely one, even as he sleeps. Deep in his summer sleep, the earth-child lies dreaming. Bound in her spell, does he see the shining one who dropped through the night into his dream? Heart-stirred she rests, the goddess sharp-wounded. Then does she feel the melancholy of mortal love, for the children of earth are falling like mown grass even as they breathe. Earthbound she lingers there, the goddess love-burdened. Gently she clothes him, turns once to look at him, swiftly the bright-sandaled one mounts her chariot and rises into the nig
ht sky. In the grass of his back yard, on this clear summer night, Danny stirs in his sleep.
Living Room and Moon
Through a pair of open curtains, moonlight enters the living room. The moonlight glistens on Laura’s silver-speckled raspberry barrette lying on the mahogany piano bench, on the glass-covered black-and-white photograph, taken by her father, of a pile of lobster pots beside an overturned rowboat on the coast of Maine, on the blue porcelain statuette of a Chinaman standing on the coffee table, on a bronze key attached to a cowhide keycase resting on the arm of the reading chair beside the lamp table. Anyone sitting on the couch, head turned toward the screened window with the parted curtains, would see a basketball net over the garage door across the street, a roof with a black TV antenna against the dark blue sky, and a nearly full moon, white with blue shadows, divided into two uneven pieces by a single black antenna arm cutting across the bottom about a third of the way up.
Enchanted Night Page 5