Here is another brief interlude in the “My Right Eye” series—a poem that I wrote when I was an English and Creative Writing student at Oberlin College. This was published in 1990 in The Plum Creek Review, the student literary journal.

A word about the reference to “hunter’s moon” in the title: I was thinking more about its synonymous name—sanguine moon—rather than the fact that this full moon following the autumnal equinox is ideal for hunting. Another name for it is “blood moon.” That’s what I was after, for obvious reasons. But because this is a poem, I didn’t want to be that obvious. (I was reading a lot of Virginia Woolf at the time, and of course the mysterious conceit of Edward Albee‘s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? can’t be ignored either.) I also liked the internal rhyme of the first syllable of “hunter” with the word “confronts.” As for the hunter who makes a cameo appearance in the last line, I promise you I was not thinking of Elmer Fudd. I merely wanted someone in the poem to discover the woman. Over the years, I’ve vacillated between taking out the last line, leaving it in, or editing it. With the exception of a misplaced comma, which I’ve taken out, what you’re reading here is the version as originally published.

The Barren Woman Confronts the Hunter’s Moon

which is lit from behind,
like God playing a trick
with an arc light.
It will be twilight
all night long.

The river is a nursery,
and the songs of the barren woman
sink down into the dark water
heavy murmurs whispering
among the mossy stones.
The moon illumines this—
her small drama.

The woman does not love this moon.
Yes it is her mother. Yes,
her cyclical tyrant, cold
sarcophagus, empty, empty
moon. She would like to drown
this moon that looms up at her
from the dark water, protecting
its nest of stones.

She throws stone after stone
at the flickering disc.
It splinters into smaller selves,
then settles back into its own
dumb look, stunned but whole.
So she fills her dress
with stones, and steps
into the river, swollen.

Moments later, shouts ring out
against the stillness
of the moon’s face,
against the stillness
of the face grazing the moon.
A hunter is out for rabbit.

© 2012 Marci Rich
All rights reserved.