Introduction by Ted Kooser: It is enough for me as a reader that a poem take from life a single moment and hold it up for me to look at. There need not be anything sensational or unusual or peculiar about that moment, but somehow, by directing my attention to it, our attention to it, the poet bathes it in the light of the remarkable. Here is a poem like this by Carolyn Miller, who lives in San Francisco.

The World as It is

No ladders, no descending angels, no voice

out of the whirlwind, no rending

of the veil, or chariot in the sky—only

water rising and falling in breathing springs

and seeping up through limestone, aquifers filling

and flowing over, russet stands of prairie grass

and dark pupils of black-eyed Susans. Only

the fixed and wandering stars: Orion rising sideways,

Jupiter traversing the southwest like a great firefly,

Venus trembling and faceted in the west—and the moon,

appearing suddenly over your shoulder, brimming

and ovoid, ripe with light, lifting slowly, deliberately,

wobbling slightly, while far below, the faithful sea

rises up and follows.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Carolyn Miller, from her most recent book of poems, “Light, Moving,” Sixteen Rivers Press, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Carolyn Miller and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2010 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

I realized a while back that there have been over 850 moons that have gone through their phases since I arrived on the earth, and I haven’t taken the time to look at nearly enough of them. Here Molly Fisk, a California poet, gives us one of those many moons that you and I may have failed to observe. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

Hunter's Moon

Early December, dusk, and the sky

slips down the rungs of its blue ladder

into indigo. A late-quarter moon hangs

in the air above the ridge like a broken plate

and shines on us all, on the new deputy

almost asleep in his four-by-four,

lulled by the crackling song of the dispatcher,

on the bartender, slowly wiping a glass

and racking it, one eye checking the game.

It shines down on the fox’s red and grey life,

as he stills, a shadow beside someone’s gate,

listening to winter. Its pale gaze caresses

the lovers, curled together under a quilt,

dreaming alone, and shines on the scattered

ashes of terrible fires, on the owl’s black flight,

on the whelks, on the murmuring kelp,

on the whale that washed up six weeks ago

at the base of the dunes, and it shines

on the backhoe that buried her.