Moon Over Ontario

Moon over Ontario

"Was the moon sad? I feel blue to think of it.
I
She tells me how alone, doubtful, desolate,
beneath unfamiliar constellations she watched
the moon sail sadly through the stars.
She cannot know the pathetic fallacy, the
transfer of feeling from viewer to viewed;
she has found it for herself. It is one reason
I love her so, her quick and sensitive mind
enthralls me. Reading her melancholy lines
the morning after I have again made inquisition
of her sorrow, when most she needs my shoulder
and my heart, I think of Eliot, that hypnotic quote:
La lune ne garde aucune rancune.

II

Perhaps those words have embedded themselves
in my mind these many years, for just this moment '
"The moon holds no grudges.
Have I still room and time to salvage her love
I will carve this deeper in my heart and brain.

III

I had not seen the moon for many nights:
the city shrouded in layers of Guangzhou smog.
But last night, looking down on the sleeping village
I suddenly saw, through a rift in the blowing mists
the bright moon riding calm and serene above it all '
and I saw not sadness, but somehow a promise
that we, too, will ride it out through the clouds
of doubt and insecurity: an omen of good times
to come, together again, beneath the same sky.
And I will hold her, and kiss her lovely mouth,
look up and murmur, contradicting Sidney -
With how glad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies¦:
smug and content with her, beneath the moon.

Po Wah Yuen
March, 2006