Untitled ("The Moon did not leave the canyon")

A love-and-landscape poem where sun, moon, trucks, and fences all become part of one dangerous attachment.

A love-and-landscape poem that opens with the moon refusing to leave the canyon 'even when you thought it should / have been the Sun'. The speaker declares herself 'finished with the Moonlight' though 'it makes no judgement', and 'hert by the Sun' though it 'is my life', then narrates travelling 'everywhere with him' - 'One half mile fence', 'In that terrible truek', telling herself 'don't go' - before the late, hesitant admission: 'maybe I did fall in love / later on'.

The poem sets sun and moon against each other as two temperaments of attachment: the moon stays and 'makes no judgement', the sun is life-giving but wounding ('I am hert by the Sun'), and the speaker is caught between a constancy she is tired of and a brightness that hurts. The relationship is rendered in scraps of distance and machinery - a half-mile of fence, the 'terrible truek', 'Me in the pot' - so love is mapped as terrain travelled rather than feeling stated. The self-warning 'don't go' set in quotation marks is the hinge: she records her own resistance even as she went. The ending withholds certainty - 'maybe I did fall in love / later on' - which is the poem's most honest stroke, love conceded only retrospectively and provisionally, like the moon that simply stayed while she argued with the light.