About 10 years ago, I wrote this poem, which was distributed on a lovely poster illustrated with a picture of a rocking chair with wings on its back and a moon on its seat.  The chair was poised on the roof of a house, amidst a block of other houses without winged rocking chairs atop their roofs. This poster has always been special to me.  I feel like the chair atop the house captures the feelings and events in my household.

For My Daughter Who Has Gone to Study in Japan

Second full moon in one month tonight.
Through my skylight, I watch
it take its high place before I set binoculars
outside on a tripod and search its bright surface.

I see a navel on the moon as if it hung once
like a large fruit, white lines holding
its roundness like the ones on an orange under the peel.

I think of your arms growing tight around me
as your flight’s boarding began and remember
to you the moon was always a brave soul,
lying on its back with its tiny little toes in the air,
alone in the big blue sky and the funny moon didn’t care.

I sang these words to you and never wondered
if the planet that gave birth to the moon
was as brave as her offspring, if vines and trees
mourned the dropping of their ready fruit.

 As the first fall fog rolls in from Puget Sound, I walk
toward our front door crunching the fallen berries
of our mountain ash trees, almost believing
you will be inside, a girl once again under table light
folding origami paper into cranes, crossing cooking
skewers for a mobile to hang them from.

I sit awhile on the front porch staring into wet leaves,
listening for the quiet song earth sings, her belly
full of stems, her daughter far away and bright.

One year, editors of a literary anthology asked me to write about the circumstances under which the poem evolved, and I remembered the night before I started to write the poem, a few weeks after my daughter left for a year of university study in Sendai, Japan.  I had returned home from teaching a night college composition class to find my husband setting up high-powered binoculars on a tripod in the street outside our house in Seattle.  The night was unusually clear, and the full moon was the second one that month.  I had read in the paper that a second full moon in one month is called a “blue moon.”  “Once in a blue moon” had meaning to me now. “Once in a blue moon,” it seemed, my daughter would leave for a year abroad.  She had done this four years prior as a junior in high school on a Rotary Club Exchange Student Program and now again.

For about an hour, my husband and I took turns with our neighbors having a look through the binoculars, delighting in seeing so much detail on the moon’s surface.  As we waited turns, we stood on the sidewalk in front of our house and the red berries of mountain ash trees surrounded our feet. This would be one fall that my daughter would not pitch in and help with the raking and suddenly I missed her very, very much.

Eventually, we took the binoculars upstairs to our bedroom and set them up beneath our skylight to look at the moon’s surface some more. I noticed how much the lines toward the bottom of the moon looked like the lines on the bread of a navel orange after it’s peeled.  For almost twenty years, navel oranges had made me think of my daughter. Her first day care mom had told me that in March, when the seedless navels come into the stores, she liked to peel and section them and feed them to the kids she cared for. I remember how much my daughter loved the orange sections when she had her first taste of them.  Standing in the ash tree berries, thinking about oranges, and concentrating on distance as we gazed at the moon all came together coaxing me to write a poem.  The poem’s temporal occasion is my studying the moon that night and thinking about my daughter.  Its emotional occasion is a coming to terms with, or at least expressing feelings about, my daughter’s true independence.  This was a passage in my life as a mother marked by my daughter’s fully coming of age. Somewhere in making this passage, I seemed to have realized that my daughter was stronger than I was, more capable.   I was in awe of her and felt pleased knowing I’d had a hand in raising someone who didn’t fear the largeness of the world and how to find a place in it.

The day I took my daughter to the airport, I actually lost my way by missing a freeway exit and then making a wrong turn.  As we drove in circles for awhile, I assured her that we would get to the airport in plenty of time for her to make the plane. I didn’t know where I was exactly, but I felt like we were not in danger of missing her flight.  It turns out that that was a state of mind and of heart not too different than the one evoked in the poem. I must have wanted to delay her leaving.  I must have felt a bit incompetent in the face of her abilities.  Even so, driving in circles on that important day did not turn out to be the occasion for writing the poem.  Writing the poem about saying goodbye took a blue moon and the witnessing of my husband’s enthusiasm for setting up binoculars so everyone could see it.  The evening was special, and I wanted to share it with my daughter.

It interests me that although earlier drafts of the poem mentioned both the goodbye my daughter had already made to her boyfriend and my husband setting up the binoculars, the men in our lives didn’t make it into the final version of the poem.  I had certainly appreciated my husband’s efforts with the binoculars; however, although others helped set the scene from which I wrote, only my daughter and I, whether in real time at the airport or in recollected time on the page, shared the moment.  It was like looking into a two-way mirror: we both saw that her life was on a gigantic world-wide trajectory, and that she could certainly handle it.

If you would like to start a poem or an essay about a passage in a relationship, you can benefit by combining your desire to write with a sky event or observation.  First, brainstorm or cluster ones you can think of:  meteor showers, seeing Mars close up, winter constellations, eclipses or the Aurora Borealis, for instance.  Next, research information about one sky scenario that attracts you.  Describe yourself witnessing one of the events or sights.  Describe a particular image that you see in even more detail and by making metaphors if you can.  Next, associate from that image to a memory involving the person in the relationship you are discussing. This can be a very private association and doesn’t have to be explained fully.  Continue writing from your memory of that person and the time in their life that the association brings up for you.  Now write again about your observation of the sky event.  You can include words about what the event is called in myth or in folklore.  You can write about what this makes you think concerning the person you are writing about.  You can talk about the last time you saw the person or another memorable time you saw the person.  Give the details of what you said or thought and what the other person looked like and wondered about.  Finally, what about the sky event can help you bring the feeling you have about that person fully on the page?  Use attributes of the sky event or observation you chose to work from to evoke this feeling:  for me it was the fullness and the brightness and the distance of the moon.  What will it be for you?