Geula Geurts
Moon Child
“I’m like a moon,” my toddler says.
He’s sitting on the toilet, proudly working his tummy. He is newly potty trained, his foray into big boyhood.
Oh no, I think, not another in-house poet.
“How are you like a moon?” I ask him, smiling.
“My face,” he beams and cups his round cheeks in his palms.
As my toddler utters his first simile, something in me waxes, then wanes. To be a poet is to make bread out of air, to spin gold from sound. My partner and I make a very modest living (we don’t swim in a pool of coins), but we do eat the bread we’ve baked with words and buttered with air. In other words: we live happily and poorly in the land of art. When my son likens his face to a moon, I wish him this poor happiness too. I understand him to have the soul of a poet, but don’t necessarily wish for the profession. I wish for him to connect between the stars in the sky, to map his own astrology out of life, a language that will guide him through the turmoil and beauty of the world.
Something in me wanes. When my son likens his face to a moon, I know that he’s moving further from the source of his creation; he’s becoming more human, less angel. In his early stages of language acquisition, he learns the brabble, the ba, ma, then the word for each object he until then has been pointing (mainly crying) at, to let the world know what he wants and needs. A toy is a toy. A bottle is a bottle. A moon is still just a moon. The thing in front of him is just this one, wholesome, luminous thing, a truthful sound.
I remember my daughter’s first words: Ma zeh? Hebrew for What’s this? Her first sounds were further inquiries into naming itself. If she was to start speaking, she would know exactly which landmarks surrounded her. She would own their meanings and make them bow to her will. There was no reason for her to believe otherwise.
I see her holding hands with Adam as they walk through the garden, pulling up the weeds, and stopping here and there to name an animal or two, some birds. Cuckoo. Crane. Swift. A fly is called a fly, says my daughter, because it flies. She already understands that a name holds meaning. She decides they’ll name the flowers too. Anemone. Morning glory. Moonvine. The moonvine is white and round, like the moon. Anemone, from the Greek anemos, wind, because the flower only opens when the wind blows. In the garden, all is simple; each thing is named after the thing it does most.
I could be sigh, or tired, but in this post-garden, I’m just mother; from Middle Dutch modder, I wade through the muddy night. Yes, my boy, you are indeed like the moon. You wax when the moon waxes; you wake and I wane. Your face has become the torch lighting up my nights. A simile is a figure of speech, comparing one thing (say a screeching child) with another thing of a completely different kind (say fingernails scratching a blackboard). The sound threading both images pierces through me. My ratty night hair looks like the milky way chasing its own tail. The whites in my eyes sparkle with the light of dying stars. If you read the sequence simile simile simile quickly, you can stumble on the word smile, which also has the shape of a crescent, a sickle stuck in the corner of my mouth, a violent laugh. I am simile, a mother likening herself to smile and to scowl, to both sides of her face. These nights, my son sees the dark side of my moon. I can no longer hide, and he can no longer unsee.
A part of him now gazes at himself from above, looking at it all for the first time. He is leaving the garden of clarity. As he witnesses his own face transforming, the art of poetry guides him back to safe ground. He can still recognize himself, though now through the reflection of an image in the entangled world around him. He is like the moon, like his mother, and the orb beneath his feet: ever-spinning, moving, changing form.
His feet dangle from the toilet bowl, suspended, anticipating, ready to plunge.
“Hey diddle, diddle,” he sings. “I’m done!”
And the boy jumps over the moon.
Geula Geurts is a Dutch-born poet, essayist, and literary agent living in Jerusalem. Her lyric essay, The Beginnings of Fire, was published by CutBank Books. Her poetry manuscript, Tiny Bones Glowing, was a finalist for the Wisconsin Poetry Series, nominated for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award and the Pamet River Prize of YesYes Books. A Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared in JBC’s Paper Brigade, Guesthouse, Pleiades, Salamander and Juked.