Today’s post takes its title from a poem by Dorianne Laux. (It’s the title poem of her book Facts About the Moon.) Here’s the opening:
FACTS ABOUT THE MOON
The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you're like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What's a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done.
(Okay, that is a long “opening,” but it’s a fairly long poem, and I love it, so it was hard to cut. If you’d like to read the whole thing, along with an interview with the poet Brian Brodeur about the writing of the poem, you can find one on Brodeur’s website How a Poem Happens.)
And one more example of facts making their way into poem, the opening to Devin Kelly’s When I Think of How Chuck Knoblauch Sometimes Could Not Throw the Ball to First Base:
It’s hard, I think, to do one small thing well.
Sometimes I wake in the soft light of just-after-dark
to make the coffee & spill the grinds from the day before
all over the floor. I stop at the store on the way home
from work & forget the oil when all I really needed
was oil. I’ve lost twelve plants to neglect when they
only cared for just the slightest bit of water. As a kid,
I watched Chuck Knoblauch double pump his arm
toward first. I watched him sail a throw far over every
player’s head. I watched him stand alone in disbelief.
I laughed then, & pretended I could be someone
better than someone failing.
(It doesn’t have that extra space between the lines in the original but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to fix it; apologies.)
today’s exercise
Following those two examples, pick a fact or a question, do some light research, and see where that new knowledge takes you.
Ideas about how to get started:
If you keep a notebook, you might have odd information like this tucked away. Take a look.
If you spend time with kids, you could think about the last question they asked you that you couldn’t quite answer. (Several of the space poems in Pocket Universe grew out of my older son’s obsession with the planets. There was so much I didn’t know, and we relearned it together!)
You could steal mine: at the grocery store today, I saw a sign noting that endive* is grown entirely in the dark to keep it white. Which, yikes! What else is growing in the dark? That’s where I’ll be starting today.
*(Sidenote: I was buying stuff for this salad, which is delicious.)
If you have another fact or question you’d be willing to donate, you could pop it into the comments.
I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
I have been thinking about this one for weeks: In the spring, skunk cabbage can emerge from frozen ground because it can generate its own heat.