Mister Moon Looking Through The Window
Mister Moon looking in the window,
Angled forty-five degrees or so.
Minutes before midnight, TV show still going strong,
Me inspired by his song,
The man who woos from distances I cannot reach,
Who tempting me with valley eyes and mountain nose,
River mouth, a face that shows
The whole of him for one sweet night:
Peachy ball
Seeing all.
I’m watching and he’s watching,
Yet there’s nothing he can give
Except the tides, the tears,
Moon madness fears.
From where I sit,
He looks a little
Lost in space,
That still, still face
Accepting veils of cloud,
Black veils that shroud,
Erasing, chasing, placing
His enigma high
Upon the lists: wherefrom and why?
We’re looking at each other through
The window’s creamy glow.
Mildly roused, inspired, I.
He, embracing from the sky.
A courtship undeniably absurd, unheard:
In silence.
(revised 7.20.2019 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, July 20, 1969)
In 1902 pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès directed "Le Voyage dans la Lune" depicted a bullet-shaped space capsule shot into the rye of the Man in the Moon by a huge cannon. A year later Ezra Read composed a piano piece ("A Trip to the Moon: Comic Descriptive Fantasia") which followed the movie scene by scene and may have been used as film accompaniment. Despite the historical importance of "Le Voyage dans la Lune," many of its copies were melted down by the French military, who had occupied his offices during World War I, to make boot heels from the celluloid; when Méliès's Théâtre Robert-Houdin was demolished in 1923, other prints were sold by weight to a vendor of 2nd-hand film, and the director burned the remaining negatives in his garden. However, cinema manager Jean Mauclaire found a partial copy in Paris in 1929 and film experimenter Jean Acme LeRoy located another in London the following year; in 1997 a complete version was reconstructed from various sources.
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