David Moolten

ΛУНA (“Luna” – Unmanned Soviet Spacecraft)

     For Odette

I've read the book of life
in my mother's painstaking cursive, 
know January 4, 1959
she dispensed with the island
heat and glare by working at the base
all day so she could teach an American to turn 
under the stars. In back, by the chickens,
a radio sang its incendiary mambo
and a goddess and her rapt lover cared
little for the news, which streaked invisibly
over them. Yes, I looked up
a few things she failed to mention, going on 
about the ring, her dress, someday
a son, how in the late hours
a Russian missile just missed
the moon. It didn't matter that everyone slept
in fear then, fear of a dark side
and of the end. I was a fantasy,
a brainchild, a distant aim conceived
on paper, tender pyrotechnics
yet to come. But I already had a world
she'd saved in this small way.
​

---

Wind Farm, Shanksville

For Odette

The children might get anxious if they knew how
whimsically, how almost eagerly we leave
the highway and enter a landscape,
risk arrest just because they point
at “windmills.” Rembrandt never dreamed
of a turbine or an airplane, ditto Van Gogh,
these their hills we trespass, their wheat fields
the monumental, commonplace sky touches
in the middle of nowhere. We brush aside tall grass
with gusto as if beneath pedestrian allegiances
we believe in another, quainter country
like a past we can walk to, even live in
not in spite of but because of its genius
appearing so finite. But loneliness
won't console us, nor the children's delight in gods
who roar with an almost innovative patience,
flailing or perhaps beckoning.

--
David Moolten's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southwest Review, and Epoch, among other journals and reviews. In terms of recent publications, new verse has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Blackbird, and Hotel Amerika. His most recent book, Primitive Mood, won the T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). He lives & writes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.