Facts About the Eastern Shore, Brunch, and the Moon

We're into that stretch of Eastern Shore summer where there are so many beautiful days in a row that it's easy to take them granted (i.e. "oh, look, more sun, more blue skies and cottonball clouds, more light breezy cooling the town, whatever"). But I promise to appreciate them fully and to show my gratitude my spending more hours outdoors than I--with all my bookwormish tendencies--normally do.

J spent the weekend here, which meant that we were lucky enough to only have four days separating one of his visits from the next. It felt like absolute decadence to see him for nearly seven days total in the space of two weeks! We ate sushi at Sushi Yama in Middletown--who would have thunk that there was some pretty delicious raw fish to be found in Delaware? We also spent part of a day in Annapolis and a morning in DC. The Washington trip had one central focus: weekend brunch at Jaleo, a meal which has become a destination in itself for the two of us. Anyone who has heard me speak about DC will have also heard me sing the praise of all things Jose Andres, the chef who started my beloved Jaleo as well as favorites like Cafe Atlantico (home of the world's best chocolate and banana dessert) and Oyamel, with its killer Mexican coffee and mole. The brunch at Jaleo includes such must-haves as fresh-squeezed orange juice, lattes, velvet-smooth gazpacho, and Torrijas Castellanas, otherwise known as "the world's best French toast."

I wrote a poem at the start of the weekend too and began to see the shape of the metanarrative for Red Army Red. I realized that the manuscript needs to move from east to west, mythologizing both for the purpose of speaking about the experience of adolescence, about the move between deprivation and excess. One night, J read one of our favorite poems outloud, Dorianne Laux's "Facts About the Moon." The poem is so special because it turns the much-poeticized trope of the moon on its head, using human experience as a metaphor for the moon, rather using the moon as a metaphor for human experience. I love the turn that happens halfway through the poem:

Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped, a mother
can't help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can't not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she's only
romaticizing, that she's conveniently
forgotten the bruises and the booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can't help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

Laux personifies the moon so effortlessly, so seamlessly that the extended metaphor of moon-as-lost-brokenhearted-mother never becomes sentimental or unconvincing. The personification is witty--"she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes / two craters"--but also tender, beautiful. And because the trope has been inverted, the poem feels new, as we've never read a poem about the moon and love before.