University of Northern Iowa

Room by MoonlightAuthor(s): Barbara MooreSource: The North American Review, Vol. 266, No. 3 (Sep., 1981), p. 59Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124185 .

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dismantle the tower and lug its skele

ton down the mountain. They waited

for a windless day after a drenching rain and they burned it.

The spectacle swiftly fills me: the mountain peak like a great torch, a

volcano. The tower heaving on its

nine legs. The windows bursting from the heat, tumbling among the

rocks, fusing into molten blobs, the

glass taking on whatever shape it

cooled against.

There should be nails. Looking closer I find them among the shards of glass, sixteen-penny nails mostly, what we called spikes when I was

building houses. Each one is somber with rust, but perfectly straight, never having been pried from wood. I think of the men who drove those

nails, the way sweat stung in their

eyes, the way their forearms clenched

with every stroke of the hammer, and

I wonder if any of them were still around when the tower was burned.

The Geological Survey marker, a round lead disk driven into a rock beside one of the piers, is dated 1916.

Most likely the tower already stood

atop the mountain in that year. Most

likely the builders are all dead by now.

So on its last day the Hardesty fire-tower became a fire-tower in ear

nest. Yesterday I read that two

American physicists shared the

Nobel Prize for discovering the back

ground radiation left over from the

Big Bang, which set our universe in

motion some fifteen billion years ago.

Some things last. Not forever, of

course, but for a long time, like radia

tion, like bits of glass. I gather a few of the nails, some lumps of glass, a

screw. Stuffing these shreds of evi

dence in my pocket, I discover the

graham cracker in its wrapping of cel

lophane, and I realize I have not

thought of Jesse for some minutes,

have forgotten that he is riding me.

That can only mean one thing. Sure

enough, he is asleep, head scrunched

down into the pack. Even while I

peek at him over my shoulder he is

changing, neurons hooking up secret

connections in his brain, calcium

swelling his bones like mud in river deltas.

Smell warns me that the clouds

have reached us. Looking out, the

only peaks I can see are the Three

Sisters, each of them a shade over

10,000 feet. Except for those peaks and the rocks where I stand, every

thing is cotton. There are no more

clouds to watch, only Cloud, unani

mous whiteness, an utter absence of

shape. A panic seizes me?the same

panic I used to feel as a child crossing the street when approaching cars

seemed to have my name written on

their grilles. Suddenly the morning's

nightmare comes back to me: every

thing I know is chalked upon a

blackboard, and while I watch a hand erases every last mark.

Terror drives me down the Har

desty trail, down through vapors that leach color from the ferns, past trees

that are dissolving. Stumps and

downed logs lose their shape, merge

into the clouds. The last hundred

yards of the trail I jog. Yet Jesse never wakes until I scooch him out of the

backpack and wrestle him into the car-harness. His bellowing defies the

clouds, the creeping emptiness. I

bribe him with sips of water, a graham cracker. But nothing comforts him, or

comforts me, while we drive down

the seven gravelled miles of logging road to the highway. There we sink into open space again. The clouds are

a featureless gray overhead. Jesse's

internal weather shifts, and he begins one of his calm babbling orations,

contentedly munching his cracker.

The thread of his voice slowly draws me out of the annihilating ocean of

whiteness. "Moon," he is piping from the backseat, "moon,

moon ! ' '

-Scott Sanders

BARBARA MOORE

ROOM BY MOONLIGHT

In a saving smell of bedclothes, the moon

Collects, fire shirt

At the window; our search develops

In this direction. What are deaths,

There is only this road which leads from

The thought of you emerging like a clarity At my elbow, nor is there anything like

Our salt.

Music has porches, pitched this way From cadence to cadence, what

You took up when you lifted me

Thus far: I address myself to your hands

As we redden, you ascend my spine,

The bedclothes thump, all

The hampers in the land responding, And we allow ourselves space to rain

In this skin which leans like a bush

From the crevice of our departures.

Don't move, the door will open, a sentence

Slip through, perfecting itself,

Threatening us with dazzling coherencies

In the room where we have just been born.

Sleep, it's

What we come for, the juices

Drying on our foreheads,

Riding, riding until morning, Your shoulder which bumps and stays.

This is the moon, a thin tunic,

White enough by most standards

To do justice to our eyes, their defections, Our bodies opening like bewildered cliffs,

Grappling, unsteady with candor.

59

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