- Olivia Brooks
- May 7
- 2 min read
Updated: May 9
The Moon at Night (1890), George Inness
Full Moon Effect
Come on, Joaquin, I said to the horses, not knowing what
else to say, the storm a half-day out and closing. The sun
was cobbler crumbs the clouds came to munch. How many
of these things are following me, I wondered, humming up
the ridge, that confused scansion, its endless ragged
dactyls. How many spacecraft are even left, I heard Joaquin
say, dead inside my head. The hillside misted grasses
tussled windswept like dangerous hair. I came to the end of
my hope of arriving then, wind-raw, the last cowboy above
sea level. A moon like that used to pack the wards, I
explained between huffs, my boots soaked through and
peeling. It doesn’t really matter what you say to horses. It’s
the tone and cadence that count most. Keep talking good,
they’ll follow you for miles, down the valley, to the first
clear stream in days. You can tell them, this is my last time
on this godforsaken rock. You can tell them, imagine my
luck, Donatello chez les fauves, I’m here to count the
thunder by myself.
Triceratops
It was settled then: each time a poet died we met on the
museum steps, Friday, midnight, the only time we all could
make it, the only time the night custodian would relent and
let us in. The first few times we barely beat the dawn, the
squeak of gift-shop shoes, but soon we came to know the
crush of it across our hands, a something after all, it made a
final rhythm, our slow dismantling of the triceratops, like
childhood’s low consoling thrum of cartoons during fever.
When it lay inside itself at last, complete across the tiles,
we took turns saying what it shaped. One night we wept
when someone called it shavings of the moon. Another
night we wept when someone said it spelled a final
metaphor. In those moments before we reassembled it, it
seemed most like Athens, ruined columns, a farther artifact.
Then we roused ourselves, and rose, and worked to make it
hold. Somehow we always fit the beast back whole.
Somehow we pulled each other from the bones.
ADAM TAVEL is the author of six books of poetry, including Rubble Square (Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2022). The recipient of the Richard Wilbur Award, Permafrost Book Prize, and Robert Frost Award, his recent work appears in The North American Review, The Hopkins Review, and AGNI, among others. He writes and teaches on Delmarva.