It is a coin, a mirror, a plate, a pearl.
For the ancient Greeks, it was the goddess Selene.
For Emily Dickinson, it was “a Chin of Gold”;
for E.E. Cummings, “a fragment of angry candy”;
for Nazik Al-Malaika, a pool or an island or a basket of jasmine.
Borges suggested that, for Shakespeare, it was less the thing itself than the English word for it, that lingering syllable.
Apocryphally, it’s the image Li Bai tried to grasp as he fell drunk into a river and drowned.
Mina Loy’s “silver Lucifer / serves / cocaine in cornucopia” somewhere in its valleys, and Ariosto’s knight Astolfo finds there everything ever lost on Earth.
Beneath it, Issa’s snail crawls, Coleridge’s icicles quietly shine, and Margaret Wise Brown’s bunny says “Goodnight.”
It glides through the spells and verses of every language.
It obsessed Sylvia Plath, who said it was her mother.
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat danced by the light of it on their honeymoon—
and which anonymous poet coined that word?
Fifty years ago, humans flew up and stood on it.
Written by: AUSTIN ALLEN
Photography: Natalia Drepina
