Moon Gate

By Bruce Merritt

This book, as I believe my title acknowledges, was composed under aegis of the moon, most aptly generous source of creativity in the arts, to whom its author was (and is and shall always be) ready to respond, strives to be a reciprocal repository of her largesse. I portend that she shall be somewhat pleased with the outcome (I really hope so).

The moon, by tradition, is the fertile, abundant, and available impetus of the spontaneous vigor required to ignite the internal energy to create, spark the furnace in which to forge the mettle that fuels present and future of a life devoted to the craft of conspiratorial crimes of physiological passion, due to the power imbued in the arts; counterintuitively, perhaps, this practice imparts as well as drains … One’s body would seem to give out, fatigued, yet soul, beyond mind, continues to persist, to overcome. As the reader is aware, delirium is a state akin to an adrenalin rush once received—an offshoot of lunacy, in certain esoteric (schools), storied and buried, original-language disciplines, noted within these pages: The connection reflects, as if the segments of a well-wrought sentence. Focus of utterance of meaning, an incantation in effect of the subject’s urge to describe, subsequently to be described (nearly physically painful to portray, to utter, material given over to pass, to be expressed, to be gifted enough to be expressed; to be given birth to or vomited, that are physical functions with spiritual counterparts if nothing exists to deliver, then the heave of building results amounts to dead air, are stillborn.

The moon is primary among the chthonic deities of mankind—the moon, in fact, is a goddess (rightly so) whose prowess was nonpareil. She commands the night, illuminates shady recesses, reverses, channels and directs the dark and its darkness, its hidden forces. She sports a lordly sable mantle that shields and clothes mankind, whom she finds trembling, cowering in the damp, dangerous shadows; she regiments the terrestrial, glowing earth. No other winged celestial divinity controls the monstrous underbelly of nature as she does, demonstrably—as queen of so-called occult wisdom and where it dwells, she merits some quota of worship, some regard, respect.

The “Gate” referred to in my title is simply the entrance by which we obtain an audience with the goddess, as one of her acolytes—an entrance both opulent and humble, always open, always welcoming. Therefore, the presence of the moon infuses each poem included in this book (at least I tried to allow her in), bizarre as they become. And so each poem should not be taken lightly: The moon affects consciousness in a serious manner, which should be remembered and granted laud. Those sciences involved recognize her presence on earth, in the immediate strata of space. Matron of the mysterious, our moon attains to facets of existence that we may not fully comprehend. We do not. Mankind, at present levels of awareness, physical and spiritual, fails to expand our telescopic viewpoint, though taken back to school time and again. The poems in this book attempt to gather and document the sage experience to be gleaned from the moonlight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664189386

Bruce Merritt

Bruce Merritt, born in Port Chester, New York, was educated at SUNY–Purchase and Iona College. He holds a bachelor’s degree in science and a master’s degree in literature. He is no stranger to the tristate poetry culture. Over the years, he has organized, hosted, and participated in numerous readings and open-poetry events in Westchester, Connecticut, and New York City. He was the publisher of the short-lived literary journal Stigmatic Star and has written columns, feature stories, and op-ed pieces for several Southern Westchester newspapers, including the Sound Shore Review, based in Port Chester, New York, where he also served as editor. Aside from the pages of this book, Bruce Merritt’s poetry has appeared throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France in journals, anthologies, and literary reviews. He is the author of a prior book of poetry entitled Sentry the Horizon (011) and has just completed his third book of WSC, Route Nine: A Narrative, and is presently hard at work on a collection of prose sketches, tentatively entitled Prose and Other Preoccupations, scheduled to be finished within the year.

Book preview

45968.png LUNACY

They gave me seeds to sate my hunger,

the gardeners, who grin to indulge me:

The moon, as many do, as a beginner,

through the mutable molds, phases of infancy,

shall benefit by a guide … I garner

the germs conjured by deft telepathy,

broadcast through thick and tangible noir,

bespoke resonant notes of world-song,

rich for towns equipped with means to record,

tonic reverb, fed-back discord.

And a voice,

whose cadence, whose ache, precise and strong,

syncopates with the jog of a gong,

syncretic energy with its essence stored

in the bee-hive hills, to echo diphthongs …

42338.png

How do you hear the night, not still?

How do you listen, lacking silence?

Before the planting, the rows are tilled;

seeds are sewn, despite resistance.

Those unsewn rows reap only absence.

Those upturned waves tumor the landfills …

An alembic of laws and mayhem,

the moon, though drubbed on its drab side,

imputes hale rhythms into the tides

which sway on her dove-tailed fulcrum.

Poles of prescience pivot the ride

and ground our seesaw grasp of synonyms.

42341.png

And the rain, the ivory

spritz that riffs off the throbbing moon,

a frazzled sky, woozy with theremin spurts,

tinkles to quench the earth’s thirsting propensity

to exist on music and euphony

keyed on the mineral pink of a poison desert

tilled into frills on quilted fields, sewn

with fertile seed—that seeps, mixing in rows, to skirt

the mealy landscape with a meaty green tuned

to the frequency of a font revolving in concert

above, with the pregnant score of a plenilune

played with the silence introverts intone

over bands to which those tone-deaf cannot attune …

The gardeners grin: Our efforts were all of their own.

45968.png TIRED EYES

Still, I can barely hold my eyes open.

Sleep, real sleep, bone-rest, hauls a canopy

across everything that appears certain,

when a person neglects to harvest enough.

This embroils thoughts in a branch-tangle,

in growths that destroy what actually lives

amid the views yawns alter or obscure—

creatures of lore, who twitter in scrub, sneak

helter-skelter through the forests of lawn:

Older, bolder, tested, yet effective,

they were in control before we could speak;

they who mark where vicious things reside.

I see them when tired eyes play tricks,

who tap the dirt for springs, as if endowed as dowsers,

who wield water to wet all things green—They compress

their force into staccato jets fired off aloft

the leafy arena in rebounding arcs.

Half asleep sees no beauty to preamble

the insight of dreams, my dreams of fountains:

Dreams behave like sponges, absorb what is fluid,

absorb what is real, despite a stubborn mind …

Still, I can barely hold my eyes open,

yet sense the spray bounce off the leaf-shade

beneath which I doze, slumped on a bench;

sense the spray squirted by hose or sprinklers,

emissions of sibilant spit. Drops quiver as they land,

a marvel even in a drowsy mix—

The spray sizzles, as if shaken seltzer,

to conduct a frenzy on any unclean skin,

though it refreshes the feel of innocent flesh.

I sense a disturbance, as engines fail and halt:

The tree-cutters arrive: I revive with a start.

45968.png ON ICE

Clobbered by the wind. Robbed of comfort

by the cold—You feel moisture shard into crystals,

cling on the air, like burrs on tacky clothing,

before the uncinate barbs release and fall,

and your environs change into a smooth glittering tube

inside of a glacier. You slide as you step.

But it’s the hygric guile of raw-fallen rain,

Not the crusted dusty snow that succeeds in encasing

most things in a plaster cast, which scaffolds

crash-borne, splintered breakage, holds hairline

fractures in place, as a contiguous, cloudy,

plastic gurney-mold supports the whole corpse, upright,

sideways, and diagonally—Ice that gleams in lucid iciness

of moonlight tonight is a shining example

of the brisk clarity on which fleeting winds break

in frosted tumbles … If you follow the rain,

you get a close up view of lunar opalescence,

as if magnified; an oblong hugeness—A fetish for a farmer’s

harvest, a totem for a hunter’s fortune, streaked

with woolen tufts of mist whose fibers unfurl in a breeze.

42620.png

Animals.

Four-legged fuss-pots.

Bodies that rustle restlessly

for comfort after,

burrowing for warmth in a recess

in the walls, upset a waxy miasma of leaves.

They are principled.

They return at regular hours, as if tenants

who come and go for work, weekends

(I do not notice them leave, at least, maybe, they have a legal

income) … One may have taken maternity leave.

Home delivery, not pizza, painful, stinky, old-fashioned.

Only one of the presumed pair

appears to be gone too-long hours.

I think their duties are mutual:

Scavenge part-time, babysit the rest. They are parents.

Then they roughhouse, snuggle. We notice …

Raccoons and squirrels squabble too.

Compact, bat-like flyers,

or duster-tailed, dash-dart, and undulant branch hoppers.

Or a dreaded skunk, whose behavior

is surprisingly sincere, even cute; they are curious,

disposed to be docile,

mascot of a domicile—We had our choice.

By chance, it was skunks.

We found out, no margin for mistake,

about two days later,

when a potent, acrid, and musky lemon-rot tainted emission

discharged into the rooms,

rooted in a scare or a scuffle that saturated

the slates connecting the seams

in the ceiling of our cellar abode, gagged us

on an empty stomach …

They dwelled in the walls, our menagerie,

above us, on the sides, in and out of our rooms,

hunkered in bunches,

hobo squatters, clogs of mixed, interpolated fur

joined to evade the chill of the cheap gun-metal edge

of an exterminator’s inventive maladroit siege engines.

We were overrun, plagued, possessed.

They haunted the membranes of the house, like eczema,

swelled the joints, blemished

the inviting pallor.

We were overrun—squirrels, flying or earthbound,

voles, chipmunks, reviled skunks,

they chose an unfortunate nook for asylum …

Then we had to contend with the sirens.

Our property abutted

the prison,

mid-zone among municipalities:

Fire engines blazed,

brazen, blazoned red, burning trails to a fire

summoned into a boisterous frenzy by a jarring buzz-bell.

And EMTs, valiant, vanguard, torches

lit with ambergris

fastened above headlights in a pot, pursuant to the call

to transmute, arrived on the scene,

into winged gnomes who twitter

on flame-feathered wings.

Yet it takes a preponderance of noise to avoid,

delay or to not make it to the scene …

On ice-coated roads, one often

Swerves, steering clear to elide

a crash into cryogenics,

so many solids veiled—rocks, guard rails,

grid-cabinet sarcophagi, mummified

by wrapped wires

and a grainy gauze of snow:

Do not dismiss the dangers,

which remain lively, that abrupt mid-action

atrophied motion, the stance

in which one stiffens, stranded, jettisoned

by the jolt, frozen in a snowbank,

unnoticed, so unclaimed,

that happens

by jostle, jarring contact,

with tacky,

below-zero temperatures,

unnoted, almost until progress

causes pain …

42343.png

Sirens well up

from the riverside prison,

bullhorns provisioned

into loudspeakers, intercoms failed—

Flowering waterspouts

channel up the steep hills, up the river valley,

as if rising out of the bell of a trumpet,

the alarum for a maximum security

jail cell found ajar.

Armed guards compass point the walls.

An inmate unchecked on the roster

now finds refuge in the hills,

now finds the clarity

of the moon

as difficult to evade

as a remorseful conscience,

as the turret-guns were to hoodwink,

fences to scale

and screws who pursue availed

of those acute, hyper-extenuated noses

of bloodhounds, snot and drool,

saggy, sensory cheeks that track

sweat-scented and fearful men

as if the snouts of pigs

unearthing truffles

in a forest of alpen pines.

River towns house an unpredictable danger.

Crystals on the air hone into makeshift shanks.

The glacier you inhabit, maybe a moment, may protect you.

He hears water, trickling cold water.

It swooshes. It falls.

He smells water, feels the neuropathy of moistened coolness

on the tips of his extremes, fingers and toes, tip

of nose, as they numb.

The convict struggles to stay warm.

Connives through answered prayer to gather sleep:

It is, of course,

a Faustian pact, his deal with the devil—

his escape, his freedom, in exchange for his immortal soul.

Plus, the imprisonment of an entire town.

The town,

town in which the police

arrested him—"Freeze! You shallow stream!

Freeze! So we can walk over you!"

Now to be plagued with frozen fear by his presence

as he roams over a glaciated ice age,

through the thick-wooded hills.

A town terrorized by tales of folklore,

stories of perilous jaunts crossing decades.

And rendered with an Cimmerian logic.

A blizzard overwhelms rejected fervor.

A frigid temper, cold-blooded,

is prerequisite

For revenge to instill fear,

hot as a topic,

a cold calculus to enact.

To thrive inside an igloo

domed by an inglorious grudge sustained by blocks

of the ad hoc preserve.

A domed roof, cramped rooms, like a cloche, that contains

sensual heat against inordinate,

callous, and life-threatening cold

entombing the outside …

The river is bathic.

Animals burrow in the hovels of its abysmal hollows.

Nestle for warmth in its fluid niches. Occupy

all levels of its zones, rustle and ripple a still surface.

Sluggard lanes belie a swift, interminable current

that swimmers are stunned by, endangered too late,

that savvy boaters study.

A marbled night. Sepulchral.

Loner tugboats honk, soft-edged,

though guttural breathes.

This basin serves as their haven.

Drudgery is endemic for tankers that tack in deep channels.

This river is all reaction, naught connected resists its flow.

And densest ice but dresses surface: A river too deep

too fully freeze, bottom up, a rigid veneer,

a paltry patina, extends to rebuffs of pressure,

which explodes the heads of fish

reeled in quickly from its depths.

42624.png

The weather scowls.

How can it yet be endowed

with a rapport that radiates to affect

mammals known to have once been

commonly seen in this bay?

The weather’s crossed

brow proves maternal, then, its severity assures

our steps are stable in the mist,

that the splash of lapping wavelets is mother’s milk,

whose provisions nourish our stride.

The gelid coagulant,

the cold water, due to the attraction,

the counterintuitive blooming of life and food,

attracts seals and sea lions,

whose body heat heats the chunky brine

into a swimmable slushy soup—

saline, whisked with flippers,

raises the temperature of blood and bay into an elixir,

turns the surf to foam, like shaken soda.

And foam-laced ripples turn

the waves profuse with prickly scales

dispersed by a dull impact with shore …

Tugboats sonar like whales.

A high-pitched moaning cry the vault of the sky echoes,

as if a voice that pleads, trapped in a crevasse,

curlews with the birds, heralds of storm.

Tugboats sound sunken geography.

They echo-locate in the basin,

along the river’s length, in the fashion of dolphins,

so they can flank the bows of big boats

and tankers, undulant on crested humps,

the crashing larval blebs of spume

into which fades their chevron wake;

they flank the bows to steer a course in accord

with the evenly straightest route

in the plutonian channels, where serpents

chomp on a massive meal,

to lead them through buoyed straits.

Somewhere buried in the shoreline boscage,

the convict, even above his heavy,

loud, and rapid breathing,

audits the maritime din of the river,

interspersed

with octopods of octaves

of hands-grabby domestic noise, all joined

to foil clear thinking,

strategies for plans,

all eight suckered arms

continually seizing attention.

42345.png

Currents swirling

along the bottom sands imitate

the cold of graves.

Thoughts of conflict—about to bum-rush,

the zeitgeist, confusion

about to strike;

their interplay is obvious, external

That does not help …

The tugboat bellows a baritone query.

It chugs, churns the bilge, a chubby

craft whose zest belies its heft.

Blind in the fog

of freedom,

despite the spotlights,

fog compounded enough to require

a guide,

the pilot radios for aid.

The baying dogs scrambling on the banks that hound the blood

of a criminal bear, the leash

to be lengthened,

bent on a prolonged penance

and supplication

for the suspect

they track.

The convict wanders in foreign fields.

Stalks of wildflowers are studded with eyeballs.

Stiff and frigid, the stalks

look like shafts of wheat, shaggily bearded.

Apply the time-honored process

and the product becomes bread—

Stalks, studded with eyeballs,

feeds us with sight.

But your type of freedom,

predicted, as it is, is an escape,

shall always be flawed,

a fraud, its promise

gone, never secured …

His type of freedom,

predicated, as it is, an escape from prison,

shall always be flawed,

stained with a stigma, atrophied,

false, and too surely a fraud.

His future premise

shall never yield any promise,

shall never be secure …

The convict,

though fully compromised,

skulking in a dusky backyard,

skimming the trash for nibbled scraps,

shall also see,

but only to look over

his shoulder.

45968.png AMATEUR NIGHT

The full moon,

pale and marble-veined orb of oracles—

What torrid mischief

did she signal for me as she managed

to appear cool and smooth as a cueball,

that doomed night …

The lunar seas welled up,

swelled like bruises

on its cheeky face, tinted

a powdery blue. The reckless full moon showed

signs of wear and tear,

cratered

by the crushing tips

of pool-cue meteor impact, dusted with the fallout of chalk,

repeated catastrophes.

Night,

night that

night that surrounds

that sphere, that prismatic shine,

that conceals an identity behind a sheer raven upholstered layer of felt,

is no more than a barroom

plugged with the pitch

of pockets socketed

in the corners and rails

of the cushioned ledges

of the banks sunk

into

the playing table,

that analogue the opacity

of drugged and dilated pupils, as those of the patrons

who imbibe immersed in nests of dim light

smack in the middle of spectacled

peacock day, no disguise

amid the avian masque

of a smoky-plumed umbra.

Patrons—and their pupils,

a barroom load that floats in a marsupial cosmos.

Pouched among their young,

sallow, hungry, and parched, who swallow

oceans of stars, destined to drain them all,

as if black holes

gulping mother-load mouthfuls,

craving the milky residue lucence of innumerable galaxies,

as they shoot stiff shots of hooch,

fiery, inebriating elixirs,

lip-spittled

and very near to wretching

from the pangs of myriad simultaneous births.

Puss-eyed film, like a cataract,

compromises cockeyed sight.

42353.png

We knew the car

we had borrowed from a friend

of a friend was probably hot—stolen,

possibly by the friend

who loaned us

the car.

We drove it, regardless …

Suspect, it idled

grumpily before the pump

we impatiently waited

to pump gas from

that we waited on line

at the gas station

to procure.

Neither of us had ever owned a car.

Neither of us had a driver’s license.

Neither of us had been old enough at the time to drive.

But

we could play pool.

We had skill enough to hustle

pocket money

punning on and playing it.

Enough money

to afford petty expenses

accrued as a usual debt

in those free-wheeling days.

We were goofballs, reputed anarchists.

We gambled with impunity.

Shoved large bills into the barrel

of an illegal handgun

pressed into one of our bellies,

when a creditor came to collect.

It was theater!

We were verite thespians!

And yet, it is a definite problem these days,

enough to convene

an intervention over …

42349.png

A mark

sometimes can be

remarkable,

but far from Cain;

it can appear as the farthest thing

from a mark.

A mark is sometimes a poseur

or a discreet manipulator on the prowl

for the counter-hustle. It happens.

Deal with the agon of the agony of guile.

A mark

may be an archetype.

They come sometimes garbed as a deity.

One who wanders among men raggedly, though girdled

with golden underpants, instigator

and wingman of tragedy,

trained on pomp and full-blown ignorance,

also aid and reward;

one who mingles, when mindful, when nattily dressed,

with the hobnobs, movers, and shakers,

with sad slumming gentry.

The worst mark

can be complex, maybe intellectual,

a shark not bothering to shrink

from its quarry—

A Minnesota Fats–type viper-dandy.

Well-groomed, sink-washed, shaven, pomaded, comb slid through slick trim locks,

a change-of-wrinkled-shirt-for-one-pressed-and-hung-on-a-hanger

version of a loud-mouth jazzman, too cool,

running from a husband, gunning for his ass,

who plays marathon matches

nonplussed, a psychopath’s pulse on the job,

an almost eastern equanimity.

The type who would whoop us without mercy.

We loved to gamble.

We held the resilience of youth, like a cat

that lands on all fours dropped off a balcony

three floors up.

We were hoodlums addicted to any atmosphere

fixed to thrill—Gambling on pool,

got our goat, intimated danger, a switchblade laid

on the table. We went agog

over anything we thought of as

mystery-ready

to be devoured

when discovered …

III.

It was collusion between facts and fate.

It was a gruesome collision.

It was just shy of a fatality.

Just shy of asphalt splashed with gore.

Pieces of car were scattered across a wet,

oily street—slicks of grease

were jagged rainbows arced around mounds of garbage gathered

against a curb, frictive

with accrued grit.

Streets of sponge-squeezed surges,

pimpled pores of tar

stirred by the beating rain,

dispersed, like pool balls by a sloppy break.

Table slate warp of street diverted

purport and purpose for English,

as drainage sloped in the puddling tilt

that lured our car into the curb

jostled to bank across the meridian,

as though a hockey puck

coasting on air currents of ice

in combination with other cars,

all parked, in our amateur essay.

We jounced and rolled

and jolted

to a complete crumpled halt. The car rattled,

hissed, steamed into a piecemeal shambles

before the engine finally coughed,

went still, like a heart.

The full moon scratched into a pit of somber clouds.

Our car triangulated into a rigged game.

We lost our consecutive turn.

We were racked by balls expertly wracked

into a criminal wreck, not by chance,

but by a wax of misty rain …

42356.png

Billiards: A gentleman’s polite game of skill played in a gaslit parlor (in some other age). A costly incarnation of poor man’s pool. Pool: A game of nuance, notoriety, panache, and finesse.

Each ball, except for the cue ball, rendered in solid white, bald, smooth and lunar, is marked by a number, 1 to 15. This scheme holds true in either version—in the aloof parlor game, in the impassioned vulgar pool hall game too, that is, the game played drunk after a hard day at work—holds for disreputable back rooms in a dive bar or in finished furnished antique appointed basements, as well.

The game of pool.

Each stone ball bears relation to color.

Half the lot bears a band of pigment, painted across their pallid globes embellished like fair-ground balloons, festive, as they float and bob fixed in the sunset carnival carousel of the horizon, first held in an apex A frame,

a clustered bouquet, racked by a plastic or wooden triangle,

then dispatched, strings let loose,

cohesion shattered by the break,

wide reeling orbits, the crack of impact

like crisp, snapping boards, a diminishing distant roar

of thunder in cerulean felt that upholsters the table—

It is an arena of smashed atoms

accelerated in a controlled experiment

to parse through the genius of design, nano-details

of reality, designed

by seeming randomness—the odds of possible combinations calculated

by the number of balls, parameters of the table.

Mash-ups between opposing charges,

solid,

stripe,

conducted by

savvy use of the pool cue,

as if a conductor’s baton that sets tempo for the components

of a symphony,

for to flow in harmonic streams.

IV.

On that fine night,

the quixotic chaotic nocturne in question,

I made note

of a similarity in spin

between pool balls laved with English

and flash-blinkering eldritch swirl of red and blue lights,

blent into purple as thrown,

blurring into lusters that wash

in an every second strobe,

boxed in square plastic casings atop

the roof of a police cruiser, lead one of three,

that pursued us in our suspicious car

prior to the frenetic scene

of an accident

enacted by guilty-feeling nerves;

cruisers predatory as sharks …

Hand-cuffed.

Following a cursory triage

and rebuff by EMTs

who snickered over jokes

in disbelief about how we stood unscathed—

we were naughtily

roughed up by the parental officers—

we were escorted home,

juveniles,

remanded into the hands

of our