AFTER THE ECLIPSE
Washington Square Park was packed, young and old looking up. A man in a leather jacket gave me a pair of glasses. I saw a black/gold crescent, pretty. Like jewelry.
Others, according to Facebook, had more memorable experiences in the north and the distant wilds. But I can write poems so I walk on the moon in the far-enough past that no busybody
with a telescope can track my passage. My feet canter in the low gravity. I breathe the bunched violets I brought with me from the 18thcentury. I gave the flower girl a Kennedy silver dollar.
I stroll on the moon as I used to saunter in woods, on city sidewalks or in backyards in the dark, avoiding people. Legs with silky hinges scissoring space, thoughts abuzz, eyes drawn to the furry circle of goddess light — I stop.
No, the words do, waiting like a dog who can’t sense anything anymore who wants direction long golden head tilted up to the only available mistress.
I am mistress of my life eclipsed by my choices and what I had no choice in, emotional frailty, falling in love like being bitten by a shark, people dying. A lot of them, like a war.
All of this I tried to embrace, understand in order to embrace, embrace in order to not be lonely.
I was doing it wrong, hiding how I was doing everything wrong yet shyly impressed I was doing anything at all.
The past falls in its colors, its loose seams, tiny mirrors like the ones on my Afghan coat when I was fifteen. Winters were really cold then before the climate acceleration. The past has no bones.
I fall too, interrupting my train of thought. There are no trains on the moon, says the dog. That’s the point! I reply. No arrivals, no departures no relativity of experience with its crease of sour envy, though Einstein’s famous paper is always welcome—
I almost understood it in college. I need more old books. They make me feel young as if I’m not forever dancing in my skirt of fire
ALMOST EIGHTEEN ALMOST SEVENTY
Intermittently suicidal, wolf in my brain turtle in my chest, miserly with words, shyness my shroud ever-present antagonist I carried boxes of books through snow to the top-floor apartment I rented from an artist, feckless father of four, divorcing. Away
from my mother’s house, all-embracing spacious orbital place, circus of secrets I still keep, I stared out my bedroom window at a network of branches that felt like spirit itself, my own singular knight in bark armor. I didn’t know what but I expected something…
The artist invited me to dinner. I willed him to, having no other powers. We drank the ends of several bottles talked and talked, alcohol my parole, spent the night together.
And so, the past— a man in love with me at last four unhappy children I couldn’t be blamed for (yet) snow on the university campus glinting blue, mauve, violet
my eyes philosophers: consider this, with beauty everywhere, does fear matter? as I emerged from his car, that thumb-sized Fiat, over-kissed.
Kissed to a smear. Kissed beyond the thorns under my skin. Kissed so the animals retreated and I pirouetted like a ballerina on a music box.
Kissed without ill-intent in his loneliness though I was unready, confused, and wouldn’t grow up for decades.
Choices. Break-up. Marriage. Speak. Write. Hide this. Hide that.
Better to have choices. I could have been an insect. I might be an insect.
I had time to thrash the past with ruinous nights. Other men, separations. My husband remained himself, seeing me, not seeing me accepting or escaping on his own long, strange flights.
Kissed as he still does late at night when I’m toiling on what brings in money — he retired a decade ago, no savings; he says, “I’m sorry you worry” —
and he repeats how much he loves me, how astonishing it is he found me as if it were just yesterday. I love you too.
I love the cathedral of joint memory where the candles for the dead burn all night. But I’m safest buried in the necessary work like the king of the nursery rhyme in his counting house counting out the money.
Margaret Diehl has published two chapbooks of poems Exit Seraphim, by Ravenna Press (2023) it all stayed open (Red Glass Books, 2011), two novels and a memoir (Men, 1989, Me and You, 1990 and The Boy on the Green Bicycle, 1999, all from Soho Press) as well as poems, short stories, and essays in literary journals, including Kestrel, The Chattahoochie Review, Kenyon Review, The American Journal of Poetry, AMP, Cloudbank, Main Street Rag, The Adirondack Review, Sequestrum, and Gargoyle. She lives in New York City.