Le texte est long, évidemment, ça reste une nouvelle, mais puisque je l'ai, je trouvais ça intéressant de copier la nouvelle originelle en lien avec l'article précédent.
♡ Pom
The Distance of the Moon, by ITALO
CALVINO
At one time, according to Sir George
H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Then the tides gradually
pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earth’s
waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy.
How well I know! — old Qfwfq cried,–
the rest of you can’t remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the
time, that enormous Moon: when she was full — nights as bright as day, but with
a butter-colored light — it looked as if she were going to crush us; when she
was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind; and
when she was waxing, she came forward with her horns so low she seemed about to
stick into the peak of a promontory and get caught there. But the whole
business of the Moon’s phases worked in a different way then: because the
distances from the Sun were different, and the orbits, and the angle of
something or other, I forget what; as for eclipses, with Earth and Moon stuck
together the way they were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally, those
two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one,
then the other.
Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for
a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while.
The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high nobody could hold them
back. There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide
was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair’s-breadth;
well, let’s say a few yards anyway. Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All
you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a
ladder against her and scramble up.
The spot where the Moon was lowest,
as she went by, was off the Zinc Cliffs. We used to go out with those little
rowboats they had in those days, round and flat, made of cork. They held quite
a few of us: me, Captain Vhd Vhd, his wife, my deaf cousin, and sometimes
little Xlthlx — she was twelve or so at that time. On those nights the water
was very calm, so silvery it looked like mercury, and the fish in it,
violet-colored, unable to resist the Moon’s attraction, rose to the surface,
all of them, and so did the octopuses and the saffron medusas. There was always
a flight of tiny creatures — little crabs, squid, and even some weeds, light
and filmy, and coral plants — that broke from the sea and ended up on the Moon,
hanging down from that lime-white ceiling, or else they stayed in midair, a
phosphorescent swarm we had to drive off, waving banana leaves at them.
This is how we did the job: in the
boat we had a ladder: one of us held it, another climbed to the top, and a
third, at the oars, rowed until we were right under the Moon; that’s why there
had to be so many of us (I only mentioned the main ones). The man at the top of
the ladder, as the boat approached the Moon, would become scared and start
shouting: “Stop! Stop! I’m going to bang my head!” That was the impression you
had, seeing her on top of you, immense, and all rough with sharp spikes and
jagged, saw-tooth edges. It may be different now, but then the Moon, or rather
the bottom, the underbelly of the Moon, the part that passed closest to the
Earth and almost scraped it, was covered with a crust of sharp scales. It had
come to resemble the belly of a fish, and the smell too, as I recall, if not
downright fishy, was faintly similar, like smoked salmon.
In reality, from the top of the
ladder, standing erect on the last rung, you could just touch the Moon if you
held your arms up. We had taken the measurements carefully (we didn’t yet
suspect that she was moving away from us); the only thing you had to be very
careful about was where you put your hands. I always chose a scale that seemed
fast (we climbed up in groups of five or six at a time), then I would cling
first with one hand, then with both, and immediately I would feel ladder and
boat drifting away from below me, and the motion of the Moon would tear me from
the Earth’s attraction. Yes, the Moon was so strong that she pulled you up; you
realized this the moment you passed from one to the other: you had to swing up
abruptly, with a kind of somersault, grabbing the scales, throwing your legs
over your head, until your feet were on the Moon’s surface. Seen from the
Earth, you looked as if you were hanging there with your head down, but for
you, it was the normal position, and the only odd thing was that when you
raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the
others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine.
My cousin, the Deaf One, showed a
special talent for making those leaps. His clumsy hands, as soon as they
touched the lunar surface (he was always the first to jump up from the ladder),
suddenly became deft and sensitive. They found immediately the spot where he
could hoist himself up; in fact just the pressure of his palms seemed enough to
make him stick to the satellite’s crust. Once I even thought I saw the Moon
come toward him, as he held out his hands.
He was just as dextrous in coming
back down to Earth, an operation still more difficult. For us, it consisted in
jumping, as high as we could, our arms upraised (seen from the Moon, that is,
because seen from the Earth it looked more like a dive, or like swimming
downwards, arms at our sides), like jumping up from the Earth in other words,
only now we were without the ladder, because there was nothing to prop it
against on the Moon. But instead of jumping with his arms out, my cousin bent
toward the Moon’s surface, his head down as if for a somersault, then made a
leap, pushing with his hands. From the boat we watched him, erect in the air as
if he were supporting the Moon’s enormous ball and were tossing it, striking it
with his palms; then, when his legs came within reach, we managed to grab his
ankles and pull him down on board.
Now, you will ask me what in the
world we went up on the Moon for; I’ll explain it to you. We went to collect
the milk, with a big spoon and a bucket. Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind
of cream cheese. It formed in the crevices between one scale and the next,
through the fermentation of various bodies and substances of terrestrial origin
which had flown up from the prairies and forests and lakes, as the Moon sailed
over them. It was composed chiefly of vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen,
lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, molds, pollens, gelatinous
matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue. You had only
to dip the spoon under the scales that covered the Moon’s scabby terrain, and
you brought it out filled with that precious muck. Not in the pure state,
obviously; there was a lot of refuse. In the fermentation (which took place as
the Moon passed over the expanses of hot air above the deserts) not all the
bodies melted; some remained stuck in it: fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea
horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fishhooks, at times even a
comb. So this paste, after it was collected, had to be refined, filtered. But
that wasn’t the difficulty: the hard part was transporting it down to the
Earth. This is how we did it: we hurled each spoonful into the air with both
hands, using the spoon as a catapult. The cheese flew, and if we had thrown it
hard enough, it stuck to the ceiling, I mean the surface of the sea. Once
there, it floated, and it was easy enough to pull it into the boat. In this
operation, too, my deaf cousin displayed a special gift; he had strength and a
good aim; with a single, sharp throw, he could send the cheese straight into a
bucket we held up to him from the boat. As for me, I occasionally misfired; the
contents of the spoon would fail to overcome the Moon’s attraction and they
would fall back into my eye.
I still haven’t told you everything,
about the things my cousin was good at. That job of extracting lunar milk from
the Moon’s scales was child’s play to him: instead of the spoon, at times he
had only to thrust his bare hand under the scales, or even one finger. He
didn’t proceed in any orderly way, but went to isolated places, jumping from
one to the other, as if he were playing tricks on the Moon, surprising her, or
perhaps tickling her. And wherever he put his hand, the milk spurted out as if
from a nanny goat’s teats. So the rest of us had only to follow him and collect
with our spoons the substance that he was pressing out, first here, then there,
but always as if by chance, since the Deaf One’s movements seemed to have no
clear, practical sense.
There were places, for example, that
he touched merely for the fun of touching them: gaps between two scales, naked
and tender folds of lunar flesh. At times my cousin pressed not only his
fingers but — in a carefully gauged leap — his big toe (he climbed onto the
Moon barefoot) and this seemed to be the height of amusement for him, if we
could judge by the chirping sounds that came from his throat as he went on
leaping.
The soil of the Moon was not
uniformly scaly, but revealed irregular bare patches of pale, slippery clay.
These soft areas inspired the Deaf One to turn somersaults or to fly almost
like a bird, as if he wanted to impress his whole body into the Moon’s pulp. As
he ventured farther in this way, we lost sight of him at one point. On the Moon
there were vast areas we had never had any reason or curiosity to explore, and
that was where my cousin vanished; I had suspected that all those somersaults
and nudges he indulged in before our eyes were only a preparation, a prelude to
something secret meant to take place in the hidden zones.
We fell into a special mood on those
nights off the Zinc Cliffs: gay, but with a touch of suspense, as if inside our
skulls, instead of the brain, we felt a fish, floating, attracted by the Moon.
And so we navigated, playing and singing. The Captain’s wife played the harp;
she had very long arms, silvery as eels on those nights, and armpits as dark
and mysterious as sea urchins; and the sound of the harp was sweet and
piercing, so sweet and piercing it was almost unbearable, and we were forced to
let out long cries, not so much to accompany the music as to protect our
hearing from it
Transparent medusas rose to the sea’s
surface, throbbed there a moment, then flew off, swaying toward the Moon.
Little Xlthlx amused herself by catching them in midair, though it wasn’t easy.
Once, as she stretched her little arms out to catch one, she jumped up slightly
and was also set free. Thin as she was, she was an ounce or two short of the
weight necessary for the Earth’s gravity to overcome the Moon’s attraction and
bring her back: so she flew up among the medusas, suspended over the sea. She
took fright, cried, then laughed and started playing, catching shellfish and
minnows as they flew, sticking some into her mouth and chewing them. We rowed
hard, to keep up with the child: the Moon ran off in her ellipse, dragging that
swarm of marine fauna through the sky, and a train of long, entwined seaweeds,
and Xlthlx hanging there in the midst. Her two wispy braids seemed to be flying
on their own, outstretched toward the Moon; but all the while she kept
wriggling and kicking at the air, as if she wanted to fight that influence, and
her socks — she had lost her shoes in the flight — slipped off her feet and
swayed, attracted by the Earth’s force. On the ladder, we tried to grab them.
The idea of eating the little animals
in the air had been a good one; the more weight Xlthlx gained, the more she
sank toward the Earth; in fact, since among those hovering bodies hers was the
largest, mollusks and seaweeds and plankton began to gravitate about her, and
soon the child was covered with siliceous little shells, chitinous carapaces,
and fibers of sea plants. And the farther she vanished into that tangle, the
more she was freed of the Moon’s influence, until she grazed the surface of the
water and sank into the sea.
We rowed quickly, to pull her out and
save her: her body had remained magnetized, and we had to work hard to scrape
off all the things encrusted on her. Tender corals were wound about her head,
and every time we ran the comb through her hair there was a shower of crayfish
and sardines; her eyes were sealed shut by limpets clinging to the lids with
their suckers; squids’ tentacles were coiled around her arms and her neck; and
her little dress now seemed woven only of weeds and sponges. We got the worst
of it off her, but for weeks afterwards she went on pulling out fins and
shells, and her skin, dotted with little diatoms, remained affected forever,
looking — to someone who didn’t observe her carefully — as if it were faintly
dusted with freckles.
This should give you an idea of how
the influences of Earth and Moon, practically equal, fought over the space
between them. I’ll tell you something else: a body that descended to the Earth
from the satellite was still charged for a while with lunar force and rejected
the attraction of our world. Even I, big and heavy as I was: every time I had
been up there, I took a while to get used to the Earth’s up and its down, and
the others would have to grab my arms and hold me, clinging in a bunch in the
swaying boat while I still had my head hanging and my legs stretching up toward
the sky.
“Hold on! Hold on to us!” they
shouted at me, and in all that groping, sometimes I ended up by seizing one of
Mrs. Vhd Vhd’s breasts, which were round and firm, and the contact was good and
secure and had an attraction as strong as the Moon’s or even stronger,
especially if I managed, as I plunged down, to put my other arm around her
hips, and with this I passed back into our world and fell with a thud into the
bottom of the boat, where Captain Vhd Vhd brought me around, throwing a bucket
of water in my face.
This is how the story of my love for
the Captain’s wife began, and my suffering. Because it didn’t take me long to
realize whom the lady kept looking at insistently: when my cousin’s hands
clasped the satellite, I watched Mrs. Vhd Vhd, and in her eyes I could read the
thoughts that the deaf man’s familiarity with the Moon were arousing in her;
and when he disappeared in his mysterious lunar explorations, I saw her become
restless, as if on pins and needles, and then it was all clear to me, how Mrs.
Vhd Vhd was becoming jealous of the Moon and I was jealous of my cousin. Her
eyes were made of diamonds, Mrs. Vhd Vhd’s; they flared when she looked at the Moon,
almost challengingly, as if she were saying: “You shan’t have him!” And I felt
like an outsider.
The one who least understood all of
this was my deaf cousin. When we helped him down, pulling him — as I explained
to you — by his legs, Mrs. Vhd Vhd lost all her self-control, doing everything
she could to take his weight against her own body, folding her long silvery
arms around him; I felt a pang in my heart (the times I clung to her, her body
was soft and kind, but not thrust forward, the way it was with my cousin),
while he was indifferent, still lost in his lunar bliss.
I looked at the Captain, wondering if
he also noticed his wife’s behavior; but there was never a trace of any
expression on that face of his, eaten by brine, marked with tarry wrinkles.
Since the Deaf One was always the last to break away from the Moon, his return
was the signal for the boats to move off. Then, with an unusually polite
gesture, Vhd Vhd picked up the harp from the bottom of the boat and handed it
to his wife. She was obliged to take it and play a few notes. Nothing could
separate her more from the Deaf One than the sound of the harp. I took to
singing in a low voice that sad song that goes: “Every shiny fish is floating,
floating; and every dark fish is at the bottom, at the bottom of the sea. . .”
and all the others, except my cousin, echoed my words.
Every month, once the satellite had
moved on, the Deaf One returned to his solitary detachment from the things of
the world; only the approach of the full Moon aroused him again. That time I
had arranged things so it wasn’t my turn to go up, I could stay in the boat
with the Captain’s wife. But then, as soon as my cousin had climbed the ladder,
Mrs. Vhd Vhd said: “This time I want to go up there, too!”
This had never happened before; the
Captain’s wife had never gone up on the Moon. But Vhd Vhd made no objection, in
fact he almost pushed her up the ladder bodily, exclaiming: “Go ahead then!,”
and we all started helping her, and I held her from behind, felt her round and
soft on my arms, and to hold her up I began to press my face and the palms of
my hands against her, and when I felt her rising into the Moon’s sphere I was
heartsick at that lost contact, so I started to rush after her, saying: “I’m
going to go up for a while, too, to help out!”
I was held back as if in a vise. “You
stay here; you have work to do later,” the Captain commanded, without raising
his voice.
At that moment each one’s intentions
were already clear. And yet I couldn’t figure things out; even now I’m not sure
I’ve interpreted it all correctly. Certainly the Captain’s wife had for a long
time been cherishing the desire to go off privately with my cousin up there (or
at least to prevent him from going off alone with the Moon), but probably she
had a still more ambitious plan, one that would have to be carried out in
agreement with the Deaf One: she wanted the two of them to hide up there
together and stay on the Moon for a month. But perhaps my cousin, deaf as he
was, hadn’t understood anything of what she had tried to explain to him, or
perhaps he hadn’t even realized that he was the object of the lady’s desires.
And the Captain? He wanted nothing better than to be rid of his wife; in fact,
as soon as she was confined up there, we saw him give free rein to his
inclinations and plunge into vice, and then we understood why he had done
nothing to hold her back. But had he known from the beginning that the Moon’s
orbit was widening?
None of us could have suspected it.
The Deaf One perhaps, but only he: in the shadowy way he knew things, he may
have had a presentiment that he would be forced to bid the Moon farewell that
night. This is why he hid in his secret places and reappeared only when it was
time to come back down on board. It was no use for the Captain’s wife to try to
follow him: we saw her cross the scaly zone various times, length and breadth,
then suddenly she stopped, looking at us in the boat, as if about to ask us
whether we had seen him.
Surely there was something strange about
that night. The sea’s surface, instead of being taut as it was during the full
Moon, or even arched a bit toward the sky, now seemed limp, sagging, as if the
lunar magnet no longer exercised its full power. And the light, too, wasn’t the
same as the light of other full Moons; the night’s shadows seemed somehow to
have thickened. Our friends up there must have realized what was happening; in
fact, they looked up at us with frightened eyes. And from their mouths and
ours, at the same moment, came a cry: “The Moon’s going away!”
The cry hadn’t died out when my
cousin appeared on the Moon, running. He didn’t seem frightened, or even
amazed: he placed his hands on the terrain, flinging himself into his usual
somersault, but this time after he had hurled himself into the air he remained
suspended, as little Xlthlx had. He hovered a moment between Moon and Earth,
upside down, then laboriously moving his arms, like someone swimming against a
current, he headed with unusual slowness toward our planet.
From the Moon the other sailors
hastened to follow his example. Nobody gave a thought to getting the Moon-milk
that had been collected into the boats, nor did the Captain scold them for
this. They had already waited too long, the distance was difficult to cross by
now; when they tried to imitate my cousin’s leap or his swimming, they remained
there groping, suspended in midair. “Cling together! Idiots! Cling together!”
the Captain yelled. At this command, the sailors tried to form a group, a mass,
to push all together until they reached the zone of the Earth’s attraction: all
of a sudden a cascade of bodies plunged into the sea with a loud splash.
The boats were now rowing to pick
them up. “Wait! The Captain’s wife is missing!” I shouted. The Captain’s wife
had also tried to jump, but she was still floating only a few yards from the
Moon, slowly moving her long, silvery arms in the air. I climbed up the ladder,
and in a vain attempt to give her something to grasp I held the harp out toward
her. “I can’t reach her! We have to go after her!” and I started to jump up,
brandishing the harp. Above me the enormous lunar disk no longer seemed the
same as before: it had become much smaller, it kept contracting, as if my gaze
were driving it away, and the emptied sky gaped like an abyss where, at the
bottom, the stars had begun multiplying, and the night poured a river of
emptiness over me, drowned me in dizziness and alarm.
“I’m afraid,” I thought. “I’m too
afraid to jump. I’m a coward!” and at that moment I jumped. I swam furiously
through the sky, and held the harp out to her, and instead of coming toward me
she rolled over and over, showing me first her impassive face and then her
backside.
“Hold tight to me!” I shouted, and I
was already overtaking her, entwining my limbs with hers. “If we cling together
we can go down!” and I was concentrating all my strength on uniting myself more
closely with her, and I concentrated my sensations as I enjoyed the fullness of
that embrace. I was so absorbed I didn’t realize at first that I was, indeed,
tearing her from her weightless condition, but was making her fall back on the
Moon. Didn’t I realize it? Or had that been my intention from the very
beginning? Before I could think properly, a cry was already bursting from my
throat. “I’ll be the one to stay with you for a month!” Or rather, “On you!” I
shouted, in my excitement: “On you for a month!” and at that moment our embrace
was broken by our fall to the Moon’s surface, where we rolled away from each
other among those cold scales.
I raised my eyes as I did every time
I touched the Moon’s crust, sure that I would see above me the native sea like
an endless ceiling, and I saw it, yes, I saw it this time, too, but much
higher, and much more narrow, bound by its borders of coasts and cliffs and
promontories, and how small the boats seemed, and how unfamiliar my friends’
faces and how weak their cries! A sound reached me from nearby: Mrs. Vhd Vhd
had discovered her harp and was caressing it, sketching out a chord as sad as
weeping.
A long month began. The Moon turned
slowly around the Earth. On the suspended globe we no longer saw our familiar
shore, but the passage of oceans as deep as abysses and deserts of glowing
lapilli, and continents of ice, and forests writhing with reptiles, and the
rocky walls of mountain chains gashed by swift rivers, and swampy cities, and
stone graveyards, and empires of clay and mud. The distance spread a uniform
color over everything: the alien perspectives made every image alien; herds of
elephants and swarms of locusts ran over the plains, so evenly vast and dense
and thickly grown that there was no difference among them.
I should have been happy: as I had
dreamed, I was alone with her, that intimacy with the Moon I had so often envied
my cousin and with Mrs. Vhd Vhd was now my exclusive prerogative, a month of
days and lunar nights stretched uninterrupted before us, the crust of the
satellite nourished us with its milk, whose tart flavor was familiar to us, we
raised our eyes up, up to the world where we had been born, finally traversed
in all its various expanse, explored landscapes no Earth-being had ever seen,
or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made
of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my
most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.
I thought only of the Earth. It was
the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone
else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I,
nor she that She, for me. I was eager to return to the Earth, and I trembled at
the fear of having lost it. The fulfillment of my dream of love had lasted only
that instant when we had been united, spinning between Earth and Moon; torn
from its earthly soil, my love now knew only the heart-rending nostalgia for
what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after.
This is what I was feeling. But she?
As I asked myself, I was torn by my fears. Because if she also thought only of
the Earth, this could be a good sign, a sign that she had finally come to
understand me, but it could also mean that everything had been useless, that
her longings were directed still and only toward my deaf cousin. Instead, she
felt nothing. She never raised her eyes to the old planet, she went off, pale,
among those wastelands, mumbling dirges and stroking her harp, as if completely
identified with her temporary (as I thought) lunar state. Did this mean I had
won out over my rival? No; I had lost: a hopeless defeat. Because she had
finally realized that my cousin loved only the Moon, and the only thing she
wanted now was to become the Moon, to be assimilated into the object of that
extrahuman love.
When the Moon had completed its
circling of the planet, there we were again over the Zinc Cliffs. I recognized
them with dismay: not even in my darkest previsions had I thought the distance
would have made them so tiny. In that mud puddle of the sea, my friends had set
forth again, without the now useless ladders; but from the boats rose a kind of
forest of long poles; everybody was brandishing one, with a harpoon or a
grappling hook at the end, perhaps in the hope of scraping off a last bit of
Moon-milk or of lending some kind of help to us wretches up there. But it was
soon clear that no pole was long enough to reach the Moon; and they dropped
back, ridiculously short, humbled, floating on the sea; and in that confusion
some of the boats were thrown off balance and overturned. But just then, from
another vessel a longer pole, which till then they had dragged along on the
water’s surface, began to rise: it must have been made of bamboo, of many, many
bamboo poles stuck one into the other, and to raise it they had to go slowly
because — thin as it was — if they let it sway too much it might break.
Therefore, they had to use it with great strength and skill, so that the wholly
vertical weight wouldn’t rock the boat.
Suddenly it was clear that the tip of
that pole would touch the Moon, and we saw it graze, then press against the
scaly terrain, rest there a moment, give a kind of little push, or rather a
strong push that made it bounce off again, then come back and strike that same
spot as if on the rebound, then move away once more. And I recognized, we both
— the Captain’s wife and I — recognized my cousin: it couldn’t have been anyone
else, he was playing his last game with the Moon, one of his tricks, with the
Moon on the tip of his pole as if he were juggling with her. And we realized that
his virtuosity had no purpose, aimed at no practical result, indeed you would
have said he was driving the Moon away, that he was helping her departure, that
he wanted to show her to her more distant orbit. And this, too, was just like
him: he was unable to conceive desires that went against the Moon’s nature, the
Moon’s course and destiny, and if the Moon now tended to go away from him, then
he would take delight in this separation just as, till now, he had delighted in
the Moon’s nearness.
What could Mrs. Vhd Vhd do, in the
face of this? It was only at this moment that she proved her passion for the
deaf man hadn’t been a frivolous whim but an irrevocable vow. If what my cousin
now loved was the distant Moon, then she too would remain distant, on the Moon.
I sensed this, seeing that she didn’t take a step toward the bamboo pole, but
simply turned her harp toward the Earth, high in the sky, and plucked the
strings. I say I saw her, but to tell the truth I only caught a glimpse of her
out of the corner of my eye, because the minute the pole had touched the lunar
crust, I had sprung and grasped it, and now, fast as a snake, I was climbing up
the bamboo knots, pushing myself along with jerks of my arms and knees, light
in the rarefied space, driven by a natural power that ordered me to return to
the Earth, oblivious of the motive that had brought me here, or perhaps more
aware of it than ever and of its unfortunate outcome; and already my climb up
the swaying pole had reached the point where I no longer had to make any effort
but could just allow myself to slide, head-first, attracted by the Earth, until
in my haste the pole broke into a thousand pieces and I fell into the sea,
among the boats.
My return was sweet, my home refound, but my thoughts were
filled only with grief at having lost her, and my eyes gazed at the Moon,
forever beyond my reach, as I sought her. And I saw her. She was there where I
had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing.
She was the color of the Moon; she held the harp at her side and moved one hand
now and then in slow arpeggios. I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her
arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has
become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first
sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I
can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand
different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full,
sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.