Sailing Over the Moon in Texas

Jan Seale

June 12, 2022

for Charles

How you called from Dallas to see if 

I was still coming to the Texas State Fair,

how I said I’d lost the will, then you told me

about your tests for vertigo, and at the end 

of possible diagnoses we wondered silently

if this was not the beginning of ailments

finally halting the merriment of friendship;

How I suddenly remembered the lunar eclipse

beginning at 9:11 (why, oh why that time?)

and, not wanting our connection broken, 

how we hurried out to our respective lawns, 

phones pressed to our heads, looking east,

you dodging fir and elm, I palm and mesquite,

and began to co-narrate the celestial event;

How it was a luminous fingernail at first, 

yet I observed the other side faintly glowing. 

(You could not see the other side prompting you 

to say you had not had your glasses changed

in several years. Well, then no wonder, I said, 

but it’s just a fingernail, though I willed you 

to see the umbra and after a while, you did;)

How the fingernail was trimmed by the earth,

bursting in with the astronomy scissors, 

while we asked, Is it smaller where you are? 

Laughing, as if we could know…then Nah, 

the distance between us is nothing at all 

compared to the earth from the moon tonight, 

hugging as it is, the short side of its ellipsis;

And though we didn’t make Guinness, 

I awoke next morning to think of the numbers: 

60 years between us since high school,

500 miles the road between us, 220,000 miles 

the moon’s wink, we in a giant triangulation 

with it from our respective driveways,

leaning, pointing, straining, blinking,

What with your vertigo, my bad ear, your 

heart valve, my heartache, thinking how possibly

this might be our only time to share a celestial event;

still, how maybe next year we could try to close in

on the state fair, say howdy to Big Tex,

see the sheep exhibit, eat deep-fried anything,

and ride the round moon of the ferris wheel together.

Jan Seale is a lifelong Texan. She is the Poet Laureate of Texas for 2012. She belongs to the Texas Folklore Society, the Poetry Society of Texas, the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers, and the Texas Institute of Letters.