Poets have long, long noticed that the moon’s a nice figure for the sense we sometimes have, ‘neath the frenzy of daily life, of obdurate nothingness.

Here’s a seasonal poem, by Jacob Polley, that freshens up the old girl.

October

Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn’t turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home-time dark.

Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered or complete,

the moon’s no fruit and has no seed,
and turns no tide of leaves on paths
that still persist but do not lead
where they did before dark.

Although the moonstruck pond stares hard
the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.
Each mind’s a different, distant world
this same moon will not leave.

Such a packed, elegant evocation of human isolation, of our conviction, at times, of the impossibility of understanding one another at all! Each mind, like the moon, seems a cold, distant, different world from each other mind.

Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn’t turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home-time dark.

Some natural tide turns the trees different colors in autumn; their leaves turn yellow, orange, red, then fall off and die. But though the enormous moon shines in the sky above the leaves as day becomes “bluer home-time dark,” it has nothing to do with them. It is not that tide. The moon makes nothing happen.

Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered or complete,

The moon’s everywhere; we see it, as we walk the dark leafy park, in all its stages — halved, quartered, complete — and again we feel as though its power and presence must have something to do with us, our earth, the seasonal tides… Indeed, we know that there are watery lunar tides; but the moon’s gravity seems uninterested in the leaves.

Yellow shallows is nice as a kind of near-rhyme in itself; and it reminds us of the water, of the lunar pull on water.

the moon’s no fruit and has no seed,
and turns no tide of leaves on paths
that still persist but do not lead
where they did before dark.

We halve and quarter grapefruit, melon; yet the moon’s halving and quartering are illusions. There’s no fruit, no life, within the moon, and the moon has nothing to do with the color and fall of the leaves.

Now a new idea enters: We are lost in the October dark. The paths beneath our feet are still there, but invisible, and we lose our way. Bluer home-time dark sounds pleasantly domestic; we are on our way home. But the paths home are obscure. The disconnected moon, and the dark, and the buried paths, create a world of confusion; we are, like the moon, disconnected.

Although the moonstruck pond stares hard
the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.
Each mind’s a different, distant world
this same moon will not leave.

The eye of that pond, lit by the moon, insists that there must be a connection between the world and the heavens. Yet the autistic moon averts its eyes; it has nothing to do with us.

Meanwhile, as we breathe out of our mouths, as our mechanical, lifeless manholes exhale in the cold air, the poem concludes its morbid meditation:

We are all to one another as the moon is to us; each of us is a mystery, so distant in our private meanings from one another… But then how can it be that we’re so powerfully influential upon one another? How can we be cold isolates, frigid enigmas, when we cast such powerful spells back and forth? We love one another! Passionately! All that heat – what is it? Nothing?

Each mind’s a distant, different world / This same moon will not leave.

We end with a pun; the moon will not depart; we are stuck to the end of life with what we are; there’s no tidal turning, no seasonal coloring; we’re stuck in the mind and the body of the human being we were born into.

But also — The moon will not leaf, not turn into anything, not produce foliage. Like us, it’s sterile, becalmed, an ashen skull, a darkly orbiting mind that cannot overcome distance and difference to touch another mind.

Here’s the same idea, also poetically impressive.