After hearing about a poetry workshop where references to the moon were strongly discouraged
Goodnight moon you nail clipping you garlic bulb
Goodnight moon baring a fat white buttock
Goodnight moon over only a paper Miami
Goodnight moon you’ve been a great audience
Goodnight moonstruck wino posing as a poet
Goodnight moon and tidings good or ill
Goodnight moon with fluids leaking
Goodnight moon bound to your orbital bed
Goodnight moon of other planets
Goodnight moonscaped mountain of tailings
Goodnight moon I had a lovely time
Goodnight moon hello freeway exit
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Bridge to Nowhere
- Natural Faculties
- (Re-)Claiming the Body
- Ceiling snakes
- Train Song
- Surgery of the Absurd
- Notes toward a taxonomy of sadness
- Weeding
- Blanket
- Forecast
- Curriculum Vitae
- Lullaby
- Fist
- On Reading The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda
- Gibbous
- Song of the Millipede
- Autumn haibun
- Bread & Water
- Jersey Shore
- Initiation
- October dusk
- Goodnight moon
- Antidote
- The Starlings
- To the Child I Never Had
- Ambitions
- Learn Harmonica Today
- Two-line haiku
- Sleeper Cell
- Unchurched
- Turnips
- Homiletics
- Magic Carpet
- When the Wind is Southerly
- Connection
- Ground Beetle
- Étude for the World’s Smallest Violin
Particularly fond of the “fat white buttock,” though the rest are also fine.
Oh, I’m glad someone besides me found this little exercise entertaining!
Dave, I never had this read to me as a child but I love what you made of it. I’m particularly fond of the nail clipping and freeway exit.
Thanks. It’s a spectacularly dull book. Its very dullness and predictability are what make young children of a certain mindset so fond of it, I think.
I like the moon as audience. It’s a good audience usually.
I was thinking of the way performers like to close their shows by thanking the city they’re in — “Good night, New York!” But then once I wrote it I realized, yeah, the moon is (at least when a crescent) and ear-shaped muse who never talkes back. No wonder poets and crooners are so fond of her.
I don’t know this children’s book, and so didn’t get the fact that you were referencing it until I read the comments. My favourite line is ‘ Goodnight moon bound to your orbital bed’, which for no earthly reason I can think of pleases me immensely, the sound of it oddly comforting.
Outside the most extraordinary storm is raging. Everything in this tall though sturdy house banging and thumping in unnervingly powerful gusts of wind. I went out to the stable to check the animals… I think my torch spooked them more than the weather… and in three minutes of exposure to the storm the bitter cold has sucked the breath out of my lungs and left me gasping. So I keep on repeating like a mantra… ‘Goodnight moon bound to your orbital bed’ because it’s making me smile in the teeth of my unease. If Ty Isaf undergoes lift-off before the morning comes and I’m never seen again, take comfort Dave from the fact that I went quoting your poem!
Good lord man. I hope Ty Isaf makes it through! Head for the cellar if it gets too intense.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on Goodnight Moon.
Dave, I fear there IS no cellar! I think I’ll just hide under the duvet with Jack and hope it all goes away! (I’m sure we’ll make it. This house has survived storms for two hundred years.)