She cried when they walked on the moon

she was inconsolable

hyperkinetic.

She will never be that young again

never so full of life

as that summer of 1969

when two men scrabbled over rocks and dust

and looked back at the planet they

came from, a small blue oval

graffitied by white

hanging in the blackness.

She cried when they cut down the trees

and ripped up the soil in British Columbia

for her new home. A new home out of the forest

she had not thought of the displacement of the forest.

Of souls rooted in roots

of eagles in nests looking with piercing vision

into the heart of a human woman.

The rain fell and mud flowed

like Woodstock, which she missed,

and instead wrote about in

the song more real to most that the event.

Events and love.

She thinks about these things,

how synonymous they are.

For love is an event in the reaching brain

each ticking second observed and archived

stored in a cloud of obsessive neurons

and brought to the forefront by hormones,

eventualities and cadences.

It mystifies and animates, stirs oxygenated blood,

pours out of pores; it tickles and horrifies.

She cried about the smile he gave her when

he said goodbye, whichever he he was.

She cried about the lonely voices coming

across a quarter million miles, decoded

here on Earth.

_______________________________________

“In a highway service station

Over the month of June

Was a photograph of the earth

Taken coming back from the moon

And you couldn’t see a city

On that marbled bowling ball

Or a forest or a highway

Or me here least of all”

-Joni Mitchell, Refuge of the Roads, from Hejira – 1976