[Jim Moonan]

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Most of my thoughts on this poem don't cohere into paragraphs so I'll just put them in bullets:

• I’ve been dancing all day with this. It dazzles, as Carl says, but darkly. I feel the imagery of your Magellan poems in the final stanza. There is something so specific in the dialog that it resists my selfish efforts to broaden it to be a conversation with the universe. I gain meaning from both readings: One specific, one universal.
  
  
• The universality comes from the fact that the backdrop in the poem is indeed the universe. Though this is arguably a conversation between two people who are genetically connected, it is hard to say for certain who the ”I” is. At first I thought it to be a male but now I’m not so sure. When I step back and lock into the vibrations this poem gives off I begin to feel a mother/daughter vibe. It’s then that this expands beyond the specifics. It gathers energy to become a vision of truth and mystery side by side. The N is in conversation with nature, time, eternity, ephemerality and everything else that appears on the horizon. The old axiom, “I think therefore I am” becomes incomplete. A life lived in servitude to thought is a life lived without purpose. It’s not just that we think. It’s also what we are thinking. It is not enough to think. To find meaning in life we must be intentional in our thinking. We must find purpose. We must seek. That’s where your poem took me.
  
  
• The specificity of the dialog strikes at the heart of my own place on the continuum of mortality. More and more I realize I have moved into the margins of my conscious reality as I know it. If I care to, I can trace my movement from being at the center of the universe when it was a small place. Not much larger than the arms of my mother. Everything I needed was brought to me. From there I've come all this way to arrive here in the margin. Wherever that is. Things pass me by. Soon I won’t be there either. But I don’t care too much about the wake of my existence. I am only moving on.
  
  
• A note about dancing: it might be the purest form of expression. In the narrowest sense of the word, I’ve never been a dancer. I find it awkward. But I have an easier time finding my rhythm when I dance with my thoughts, dance with my senses, dance with consequences, dance with darkness, dance with as many things as I can find to dance with. Sometimes my eyes are the only thing that move.
  
  
• I like the expanded definition of dance that this poem projects. I feel Kahil Gibran in spots. (He said:"Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.”) This poem is a layered conversation that expresses what I have glimpsed at in my thoughts more and more — but only glimpsed. You've pulled the curtains wide for me: the way a life, as a kind of dance, makes its way and gives way to other life using the burning desire to love and be loved. That’s why I’m writing this at the moment vs. doing a hundred other things on my list of things to do. This is what I need to give me the sight to see into and through the hole.
  
  
• What this poem conjures in me is like what John Donne’s “No Man Is An Island” conjures. I’ve realized late that my own poetic senses are lit by others. I rarely self-ignite. I need outside stimulation to ignite my inside. We are joined.
  
  
• You posted a short video recently of a winged seed (from a dandelion, I think) that was “dancing”on the tip of a garden gnome. That flickering image is what this poem reveals to me: our miraculous being; the unbearable beauty of consciousness and perception to procreate and dissipate, dissolve, disappear.
  
  
• I’ve been dancing all day with this. I think you’re saying there’s a time to dance and a time to ghost. Since the dawn of human civilization we have done nothing but dancing and vanishing.
  
  
• If this poem was staged and put to music it would be a tour de force. It is operatic.

Disclaimer: I read this over two consecutive days, both days in the early morning when contemplation is at its best.

It is a darkly optimistic poem.

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