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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Rivard
David Rivard
Born in 1953, David Rivard is the author of Wise Poison, which won the 1996 James Laughlin Award...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about the Moon
Anyway
by Richard Siken
Conversation Galante
by T.S. Eliot
If the Owl Calls Again
by John Haines
Lunar Paraphrase
by Wallace Stevens
Moonlight
by Sara Teasdale
Night Baseball
by Michael Blumenthal
The Creation of the Moon
by Anonymous
The Harvest Moon
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
by Edward Lear
They Lived Enamoured of the Lovely Moon
by Trumbull Stickney
Untitled [and the moon once it stopped was sleeping]
by Erika Meitner
Poems about Time
Figure
by Marjorie Welish
Individual Time
by Alice Notley
Meeting and Passing
by Robert Frost
Mimosa
by Mary Ruefle
On Time
by John Milton
Poem with Lines from Pierre Reverdy
by Sandra Simonds
Real Time
by Charlie Smith
Slur
by Jacek Gutorow
The Edges of Time
by Kay Ryan
The Sun-Dial
by Adelaide Crapsey
Time does not bring relief (Sonnet II)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
What God Knew
by Marianne Boruch
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The Moon in Time Lapse

 
by David Rivard

The moon in time lapse sliding over skyline
the way a remote frisbee might wheel through air
as slowly as a banjo once floated across the wide
Missouri River in my mind when as a boy
the devil to pay permitted me to dream-up
my get-away from home, far from my parents'
witchy vigilance & the wine-barrel cellars
of their household—this after my experimental
stuffing of a dinner fork into a light socket
in the green gazebo under backyard grapevines.
That fuse box blown & blackened was the bliss
of departure—it was thrilling, but sometimes
I have to stop to touch my life & see if it's real.
How surprising to find that I wanted so much,
and mostly got it. My fantasies are fewer now
(one involves living through a day without
resentments, the other getting seated next to
gorgeous Fanny Ardant on a puddle jumper).
No need to see my life as a story the world
has to read, no need for sentimental
mooning & nostalgia—blessed with a bit
of amnesia anyway, I don't recall much
of what went down. I know that it's engraved
there on some cellular level, & that I can't
command the consequences. Like a spider
who has climbed atop a survey stake in a bull-
dozed field, I feel slightly truer in any case.










Copyright © 2011 by David Rivard. Used with permission of the author.
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