April 2019
Kate Sontag
sontagk@ripon.edu
sontagk@ripon.edu
NOTE: I normally revise poems dozens, if not hundreds, of times. I'd like to claim this is my "best poem" ever written in a half hour. It arose from my husband naming the spring solstice moon aloud when we were in Philly last week visiting a poet friend. My friend and I, in need of a jumpstart after a trip to the Mutter Museum, challenged each other to write a poem with "Maple Sugar Moon" in it. We sat in her living room typing on our laptops for about thirty minutes. I've tried revising this, but the first draft is the best.
Maple Sugar Moon, I Hear Your Name
spoken by my husband like a mystery
to be solved as we walk on this warm
Philadelphia morning down city blocks
I barely recognize like your name.
How quickly you become my sweet-
tooth in the sky, love-scape between
landlocked and heaven-locked,
celestial cry among museum skulls
on exhibit. Hairless. Frightening.
Ghosts of disease collected for science.
Each pair of delicate eye sockets might
have looked up at you during solstice
when they inhabited bodies like ours.
Known the richness of your light.
This is the month farmers will tap each
tree beneath you until their forests run dry.
Until we become such perfect arcs of longing,
the sickle moon inside us wanting to learn
from your season of supply and demand.
Who wouldn’t want to be so smoothly
disintegrating as you are in the March
sunrise then reappear full at night.
I taste you in my bed. I lick each
powdery star of you from my own
longing, the spring sap rising
sexual, until we are drunk with it.
Maple Sugar Moon, I Hear Your Name
spoken by my husband like a mystery
to be solved as we walk on this warm
Philadelphia morning down city blocks
I barely recognize like your name.
How quickly you become my sweet-
tooth in the sky, love-scape between
landlocked and heaven-locked,
celestial cry among museum skulls
on exhibit. Hairless. Frightening.
Ghosts of disease collected for science.
Each pair of delicate eye sockets might
have looked up at you during solstice
when they inhabited bodies like ours.
Known the richness of your light.
This is the month farmers will tap each
tree beneath you until their forests run dry.
Until we become such perfect arcs of longing,
the sickle moon inside us wanting to learn
from your season of supply and demand.
Who wouldn’t want to be so smoothly
disintegrating as you are in the March
sunrise then reappear full at night.
I taste you in my bed. I lick each
powdery star of you from my own
longing, the spring sap rising
sexual, until we are drunk with it.
© 2019 Kate Sontag
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF