[Alexandra Baez]

Jim, hello, so good to hear from you again!

One of the reasons why I love poetry so much is because there’s always a possibility that it will open up to me if I come back and give it a chance. I’m glad I did this one.

Me, too! So what happened to this from your last comment:

But I think, too, that there is room here to improve its buoyancy.

? Have you changed your mind?

Anyway, I’m so glad you feel that the poem “has spell-binding qualities and epiphanic overtones,” because I was striving for both. “Epiphanic” has a religious connotation, like “visitation,” right?--even though the former’s application spreads wider. I’m really happy to hear that you’re responding, too, to the weaving in and out, the separateness-yet-intertwinedness that I was trying to evoke, and, yes, alchemic feel of the incident. Did you get the parallel of the n with her dark bedding and light moonshine-sheets, to the moon with her black and white scarves of clouds? And their mutual coverings and uncoverings? As often as I've tried to follow these parallels through to the end, they start to founder when the n and the moon intersect, and I still haven’t been able to quite figure out how all the lines of symbolism (see below) could, much less should, work, but I didn’t want the poem to try too hard, either, because it started out as a simple nature poem and I mainly just wanted to project back what I’d experienced. Part of what makes nature raw and compelling is its resistance to understanding.

I think it is warm and sensual and celestial and dark and light (I love the word "chiaroscuro").

Warm—now that’s one word I hadn’t thought to apply to this, with its “coolly” in the last line! It’s intense, though, so warm in that sense. I love “chiaroscuro,” too, and I'm happy to have unexpectedly fit it into a poem.

The emerging image of the moon as being feminine gives the ending an animated, surreal feel. It's great.

Wow, good to hear! I’ve read this thing so many times by now that it’s hard to know how I’d really perceive it unprimed.

It is so tightly written.

Thank you! I wish you could see the pile of drafts that led up to this.

I thought maybe “Visitation” had too much of a religious connotation, but when I think about it again the one other application that is suited to be titled “Visitation” would be dreams.

Oh, I think I had briefly thought of that, and it makes sense. I chose the title because the experience felt awe-inspiring--no mere visit, for sure. But as to religious (or spiritual) connotation, you also can’t overlook the “unmoved mover” of the last line—a very direct (Aristotelian) reference to God. I only recently realized how an earlier version of this poem (without that phrase) could be perceived as an allegory of spiritual awakening. Once I did, I tried to gently center things around that concept, because I tend to prefer poems that have layers, including a symbolic one. So the moon here can be seen as the feminine aspect of God, creeping upon us unawares but dazzling us in her own quiet yet insistent, mystical way once—or if—we awake. If we're receptive enough, we'll cast aside our trappings of oblivion then to open into the greatest dream of all—this time, “dream” in the sense of an astonishing highest reality, dream-seeming only because we’ve become so used to our more limited delusional “reality.” In the highest state, like the moon and unlike the restless n, we’ll be equally unaffected by darkness and any forms of light lesser than that of the Source itself.

But the fact is, good poetry is an intensely personal artistic expression that can be considered a success if even one person notices it . . . The only poem that fails is the poem that no one ever reads.

Hmm, I’d go even farther and say that if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, that it still made a sound. And oughtn’t we, too, to consider the poem’s effect (in both the writing and the reading) on its writer him- or herself when assessing its success?

And if one person finds it good, then it's good.

Mmm, I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I appreciate your magnanimity of spirit.

This line is full of movement: "swirling scarves of black-shot clouds" It’s like a van Gogh painting.

Thanks—the scene created a strong impression of a juxtaposition of unworldy turbulence against a backdrop of stasis, that I was keen to capture.

And "full-fledged moon" is so gorgeous description of the moon I find it hard to believe it hasn’t been used before. Maybe it has. But it fits this poem perfectly.

Oh, I’m glad you like it! I was hoping to find some sort of adjective that meant “a ruler at the peak of her power” to go with “silver-crowned,” but “full-fledged,” which I’d tried before, was the closest I could come. In any case, in this draft, I was eager to avoid simply saying “a full moon,” and I also finally realized that it would be best to wait till near the end to actually explicitly identify this moon.

By the way, do you feel any special affinity with the moon on account of your last name? There are all sorts of things you could do with the name-reference part of the last line of a ghazal.

Well, Jim, your comments really boosted my spirits this evening. You’re “getting” so many things about this poem that I’ve hoped people would.