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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy
About her work, Richard Howard writes: "The resonance of Shaughnessy's poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain."...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Outer Space
A Clear Midnight
by Walt Whitman
As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden
Bright Star
by John Keats
fragment: "To the Moon"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Hymn to the Night
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Let Evening Come
by Jane Kenyon
Moon Gathering
by Eleanor Wilner
Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck (Sonnet 14)
by William Shakespeare
Orion
by Susan Gevirtz
She Walks in Beauty
by George Gordon Byron
Sky
by Anzhelina Polonskaya
Skylab
by Rolf Jacobsen
Star Quilt
by Roberta J. Hill
Starlight
by William Meredith
The Truth About Northern Lights
by Christine Hume
Yellow Stars and Ice
by Susan Stewart
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I'm Over the Moon  
by Brenda Shaughnessy
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I don't like what the moon is supposed to do.
Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient
date-rape drug. So I'll howl at you, moon,

I'm angry. I'll take back the night. Using me to
swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,
the world's worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.
But you disappear for nights on end

with all my erotic mysteries
and my entire unconscious mind.

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It's like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I'm going to write hard
and fast into you moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn't understand.
You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.
That's not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch
sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.
Stars have those.

What do you have? You're a tool, moon.
Now, noon. There's a hero.

The obvious sun, no bulls hit, the enemy
of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures.

But my lovers have never been able to read
my mind. I've had to learn to be direct.

It's hard to learn that, hard to do.
The sun is worth ten of you.

You don't hold a candle
to that complexity, that solid craze.

Like an animal carcass on the road at night,
picked at by crows,

haunting walkers and drivers. Your face
regularly sliced up by the moving

frames of car windows. Your light is drawn,
quartered, your dreams are stolen.

You change shape and turn away,
letting night solve all night's problems alone.



From Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy. Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2008. Copyright © Brenda Shaughnessy. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.


Audio Clip
October 19, 2007
The New School, Tishman Auditorium
From the Academy Audio Archive
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