Sally Mehler, Neighborhood at 9:03 PM, Photograph
SILVER MOON OVER SLEEPING STEEPLES
After David Sylvian
You are as close as you have ever been
A shining quarter,
A pale communion wafer,
A joy filled tear drop,
Resting in an oblique darkened vault.
And we are all angles
Ninety degrees from the earth
And ninety degrees from each other.
It is only in this intimate restraint
That we chance to meet.
_____________
Marc Janssen
Review by Mykyta Ryzhykh
Is love passion or is love restraint? Can intimacy be distancing? Too many questions: that’s a good thing.
Review by Jared Pearce
This poem’s specific, concrete images—even it’s mathematic precision—really make it inviting. Well, that, and the move from our consideration of the moon to our consideration to each other—that also makes the poem delightful.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
You’d think that all the poetic capital of the Silver Moon has already been spent, leaving nothing left to say on the subject – you’d be wrong. Geometries, astral trajectories, delicate gravitational balances measure and discern within the space of a breath the peaceful pastoral scene from the planetary collision. Those perpendicular bisectors speak of our encounters as a question of joiners, educated assumptions, fragile constructs we assemble on each other like a house of cards.