an old poem fixated on thoughts on the inconstant moon

Do I even remember all the details? A poem remembering her last summer in Alexandria, 1988, Clare Latremouille, who graduated high school a year before my eventual ex-wife and I, wandering west with partner and son into Chilliwack, Victoria, Vancouver and finally Kamloops, and we wouldn’t see her again for another nine years. When I finally did, visiting them in Kamloops in 1997, I wrote a piece called "clare & bryan, years later" that ended up in the collection The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talonbooks, 1999), making an earlier appearance as the chapbook The Wiser (housepress, 1999). It was even more years before they returned east, another small boy in tow.

a brief history of the moon

as unreal as anything could be
green grass, hills, water down streaming
moonlight becomes
a practiced bulb of feeling under
bridges, clare a troll & climbing
over rock face, water face &
“i want what shes having”
mere months into our marvel
& a transition line, a lie

What is it about the moon? I should just admit my own fixations and publish a collection of moon poems, this little poem from the unpublished "vague histories" manuscript. A poem about home, and finally leaving that home, that transition line between what was, and what was to come. Wasn’t this from the night she broke Al's passenger window in his truck? Clare, Ann-Marie, myself, Kahlil, Doug, Al and who else? Whatever happened to Al? Did we ever end up going back to the bridge at McCrimmon’s Corners, nicknamed the “moon bridge," for the sake of how clearly reflections could float? Have I ever told you the story?