Sunday, May 18, 2008

Lunar Eclipse in San Francisco (2/20/08)

Sitting on the left breast
we strained our eyes to clearly see
something deflatingly familiar.

As the city reached out
just to the bay
we could not tell if the moon
were obscured by clouds.


Again, I thought I should include something more recent on this blog. I'm still not sure about this one -- it feels very uneven to me.

The use of 'breast' in the first line for example, came from the joke that the Twin Peaks of San Francisco are very breast-like. You can navigate by thinking about a giant woman with her head pointing into the bay and then talking about her right and left breast. I feel like more of this story should be in the poem, or I should lose that word altogether.

It was really built around the final two lines, but even there I struggled a lot with the tense and mood. "If the moon was obscured by clouds" might be better, for example. It's just too early to say.