Awakening to the Moon
by
David Bowles
David Bowles
A life-long resident of the Rio Grande Valley, David Bowles has authored several books, including Shattering and Bricolage, The Seed, Mexican Bestiary, and Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry, which was awarded the 2014 Soeurette Diehl Frasier Award for Best Translation by the Texas Institute of Letters. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous magazines, including Rattle, Apex Magazine, Metamorphoses, Translation Review, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, Concho River Review, Huizache, Texas Poetry Calendar, Interstice, Out of the Gutter, Eye to the Telescope, SQ Mag, James Gunn's Ad Astra, Red River Review, Ilya's Honey, and BorderSenses.
Formless whorls of light
swell and ebb in dreams
marching close then slipping
away till, in a limbo edging
wakefulness, the argentine
abstraction contracts into
a bright sphere that streams
its cold, hard illumination
through the window.
In this mythic frontier between
oneiric and empiric realms
it is never clear how the cowardly
god, false arrogance dimmed by
a rabbit's feet, became the defiant
woman, her head hurled into
the heavens: whatever its source,
that slaty glare shimmers askew
upon the still, silent world,
mute and menacing.
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