Wednesday, August 13, 2014

"The moon is no door"



In "The Moon and The Yew Tree", Sylvia Plath writes:

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

The other night, while staring at the moon, I saw an elevator button, the one I press to take me to my dentist. Or years earlier, the one that connected me to my father's apartment, when he lived at the west end of Nelson Street

and I would call on him on Saturdays, to play tennis, or as the years passed, to walk to the Denman Place Mall, where we would sit inside the cafe's fenced-in patio and smoke cigarettes at a table round enough for others to join us

that imperious older couple from Vienna, who strolled in so tall and well-dressed, their blonde hair greying at the same rate, or the loud-mouthed tanned couple in sporting gear who ended most conversations with the insistence that their detractors be "taken out and shot"

or the woman who sometimes served us, whom I came to know outside my visits, Heather, who was nice to me in ways that suggested the man I would become --

all gone now, dead or moved on.

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