Up until that time, I had viewed-- and written about-- many lunar experiences, including eclipses, like this poem:
NOTES
DURING THE LUNAR ECLIPSE
Seven star ladle
flecks into the black sky.
For
all its darkness, light.
Moon, less moon, moonless.
Still, clouds and stars. Then moon, more
moon, mooniest moon.
🌒🌓🌔🌕🌕🌕🌖🌕🌔🌓🌒
This poem was the first I ever won a contest (and money) for, which came with an illustration by a Cleveland artist named Julie Watkins for a poster on buses all over Cleveland, which I stole dozens of the last week it was up. It was the shortest poem I could make out of the longest moon viewing I had ever sat through.
Years later, while I was teaching at The University of Findlay, there was a partial solar eclipse one day, and we were all invited by our terrific astronomy prof, Sam Littlepage, to a rooftop to view it through special equipment, and I wrote this:
MY FIRST ECLIPSE
We stood on the roof
at lunch time with fifty people,
passing the mylar glasses
that let you look.
In front of us a machine
projected the shadow
of what passed on the screen
where we saw the moon
don her gray pearls
and slip over the sun,
leaving a ring of light
like the circular tube
of a kitchen fluorescent.
Everyone agreed they had really
seen something and then
went back to work.
🌇🌇🌇🌇🌇🌇🌇🌇🌇🌇🌇
But experiencing that eclipse in Managua in 1991 thoroughly unnerved me--in a good way. And get this: we didn't even look at it. We had no glasses. We had been warned. So we went out to the backyard of our temporary housing, a large building with many rooms, empty that day, and backyard, so huge and walled that, while it was in the city, it was filled with tropical vegetation that seemed miles away from anything. Without ever looking up, we experienced the awe of a total eclipse. I'll let the poem tell you the rest. But I will say this: don't worry if you can't lay hands on glasses next Monday: go out and feel the eclipse.
TOTAL
Managua,
Nicaragua 1991
Maybe
the doomsday part
didn’t
happen just for us, or maybe
we
misread, but eleventh century
Mayans
predicted the 1991 event
in
Nicaragua to the day
in
data that scientists can decipher
now,
and not just squiggles
we
pretend to understand.
Surprising
for our epoch,
the
three Managua dailies agreed
for
the first time: looking at the eclipse
would
be bad news,
which
it was, the day after
when
each carried photos
of
people looking up, aside stories
of
all those blinded.
So
we stood in that backyard,
looking
only as high
as
the papayas hanging
like
orange caution signals
while
the lights went down
as
in a church right before
the
ushers march in with candles
on
Christmas Eve.
The
sun foisted its absence on us
minute
by minute
as
the birds launched into vespers,
then
awful screeching
as
though rubber on pavement
that
turns to crash
and
instead, an enormous
hush
happened as blackness fell.
We
couldn’t see to return
to
the house, couldn’t even
see
each other, just stood
embracing
in the sudden deep
silence,
not knowing how soon
it
would pass, feeling not doom
but
a boon: feeling something
we’d
never not seen before.
