blame the moon

or some other heavenly body

dear friends, how are you faring? what is landing within you? what is sloughing off? what are you writing down? (these question marks are not literary devices, by the way. tell me, i really want to know).

lately i can’t stop writing celestial bodies (maybe it’s the body counts, the streets of heaven are too crowded, etc.). maybe it’s the moon, waxing to full, and summer waning to fall, in the same week.

i write us down as stars, we humans who could be so beautiful; then as moons and tides, we lovers who keep dancing back and forth; i salute the sun, oh great Vivifier, and stand in the sea praying for rain; i write myself as the sea, and then a blue planet, heavenly body with gravity, with pull. and on the blood moon that begins this season of syzygies… how will i write that down?

//

also i am writing about blue (as if this word could mean any one sight or sensation). blue that tastes like warm stone. blue that dances. blue that might swallow your eyes forever.
how more poets than one¹ could fill a tome with these hues. how there are so many names but none of them is right for this sky, nor this sea - ‘too blue for that hackneyed phrase which has described every muddy pool from pole to pole…’.² how there are sounds, scents, whole weeks that can only be called blue.

//

poems can hold what we cannot - a color, a planet, a supernova, a country - and that’s enough for me to keep writing them down.

//

be reasonable, woman

maybe this is why Mirabai
turned her heart to the heavens.
maybe she too
wanted a whole universe
to match her infinite ocean 
of a heart. 
why she threw devotion 
in great fistfulls to the stars, 
danced, sharing her nakedness
with the moon. Mirabai 
sang   wrote   walked 
poems shaped like days
for her beloved, one she knew
to be a whole Universe
one who could consume
the magnitudes of her love
and still have room, 
always, for more.

//

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be well, friends. be good to each other. sending love from here.

💚//mischa

1. see Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald on seeing the Mediterranean