Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Is it true a ring around the Moon means rain?

True in the forty to eighty percent range.

What, then, of our double Moon illuminating the Anasazi healer who passed the pistol on to the ill-fated Navajo Prince? asks an interrogator so familiar that if we know the magic words we may already have "internalized" him together with his ideal clarity never mind the healing effect of information.

We can reply that the double Moon was a phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties visible in the Four Corners region where an unobstacled view of the sunset horizon was had during the brief years that housed nomad demons in and out of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head-hole which a visiting Anglo hermit advised the med’ciners not to cover with the government-issue muslin there seemed to be considerable supplies of, and at sunset the demons were visible if you knew how to look mto her head, demons dark-earth-colored, mobile-brown and glittering gray, but colorful, even creamy, as much as muscularly material, whereas she who could not stretch her eyes to see into the hole knew them to be most tumid blue and the sharp orange of those ancient volcanic apricots still visible every fourth August — except, on the nights of double-moon-rise, when the demons were another color — that is, when for a long stop like the original sunset that may last for years after a volcanic eruption one multiple demon flashed pale green to erase all others and their colors:

and on such nights when the green flash was seen at twi-set between "the history of the day and the history of the night," the Moon would double or twin in some regions of Sky or Earth or both. And so the ancient Anasazi healer whose real medicines had taken him for years away from his faithful wife and children so that he threatened to become a witchdoctor who parts, say, the husband from the wife if in luck so not even snake root helps the man, or instead of giving soapweed mixed with a special cactus to help the mother in labor when the baby won’t come, administers it much earlier and differently so the gal aborts and afterward is unable to know if she wanted to or not — the Anasazi healer felt the Moon double him with its light or be seen by each of his eyes individually.

Nevertheless, the white-lipped female zoologist Mena, studying the fierce javelina all the way up from the southern hemisphere, had met the botanist Marcus Jones (of whom no visual record remains within us) pedaling down through and beyond the monumental debris of Colorado seeking yet one more new type of locoweed — and she claimed that the doubled shadow he cast upon her when he got off his bike to greet her where the light of night brought the desert closer about them had before Jones was gone become hers to convey until her next human. This was the ancient Anasazi who, because her appearance at the top of his ladder caused the pistol in question to throw two shadows, had seen two Moons and thereupon had admitted he was not sure if the pistol had come from the mestizo spy years after the Mexican War or alternatively from a half-Sioux Thunder Dreamer (one of that clown elite who must act out their least-appealing dreams in public even to the point of turning themselves literally inside out) who claimed he had been given the pistol by a dying white settler prone among the wind grasses of southern Dakota as a charm to tame that religious movement of the eighties the Ghost Dance with which the Indians in despair hoped against hope to stop the increasing pain of invading bullets though in particular it was each individual’s transcendent guardian richly painted on the Ghost Dance shields on government-issue muslin that must memorably refract these currents of detonated daylight from their course, while the community on good days intuited through custom — long before law got round to firming it up — the difference between bullets and light, the sign that detours you off onto yet another course and the true way of the explorer that bends if need be to circumnavigate a route that may in the end prove more direct.

But what prisms of sight carried the mother and with her a divided son, left out yet asked along, from the active Mantoloking beachhead out to a horizon more northern than could be explained? — for our sailors tell of those high-latitude mirages whereby the land below the horizon levitates if it does not invert into sight, and we see where we are going before it sees us.

An explanation — little more than that — as that light entering a different medium promises to bend — or that a mother we already recalled before we had gone far enough in our research to reconstitute her was the one who left her sons with the promise that they were the ones going away, a mirage factor that keeps its distance no matter how we go on or go back, to tell us something past mere satisfaction as the shine of a distant desert lake meets the shade of some earthly substance over the hill of our New Jersey still-wartime sea.

Facts worth their weight in gravity if they can only carry a tune to get them to the noise the tune hides in case — ti-dum-whung-lu — it needs to be moved fast and be in not Sarah’s open case but Thomas Jefferson’s violin terminally cased while in a next room he wrote with his left hand to Le Roy in France about the weather (Seasonable in Monticello; how makes it at Mont-pellier?) if ‘twas the same Le Roy (in the history of rain, the "humid" Le Roy) the Le Roy who in the 1750s (so it couldn’t almost be the same one) discovered dew point by sealing damp air not in a painted can as we did 1950s New York City air for tourists and Paris air for the Clignancourt flea market, unless you could hold your breath for the lag of your homeward leg there to transfer it to the tunnel of a loved one’s mouth and system, but in a bottle where the temperature was falling, until drops formed like tunes to Le Roy’s eyes, and in measuring this degree of the air’s saturation he brought all of us closer to the causes of rain. And found, with his improvised hygrometer of goblets indoors and out, that where he was the dew point varied with the wind direction — further, that the northwest mistrao and the northeast grec are not so dry as the north wind, nor so moist as the south wind from the sea, and dry and moist are relative in air so that dry air on a summer’s day may contain more water than moist air in winter.

But (and we turn to the child speaking and rotate so’f we was in a Choosing Configuration we’d just go on spinning) — But he wasn’t the inventor of rain, right?

Right (we are so happy to give a Yes or No answer to a child, the slight smile upon its face or certain parts thereof) — No, my dears (for it’s a multiple child!) he wasn’t. Nor, fifty years later, was he likely to have been the Le Roy to whom Jefferson, having broken his right or violin wrist on a walk with a mere acquaintance wrote a rambling letter with his left hand and never had the strength to play again, though four days later he attended a concert and the following night went alone to the opera, our all-purpose Jefferson, and never once stopped taking notes, as witness less than two years later his observations in Europe both of windows that admit air but not rain, and sawmills that run on wind, not to mention his having instinctively grasped the modern dream of urban sprawl proposing a coastal Thru-Way from Nice to La Spezia, an Alps by-pass for travelers entering Italy whereby, as T.J. said, "all the little insulated villages of the Genoese would communicate together, and in time form one continued village" ahead of its time along that route.

Which had been, to cite from Larry what Jefferson six generations or so earlier could not have termed it, his personal Modulus to give back to world civilization all the energy-to-burn that had fractured his wrist. And could have led to his discovering in Inner Choor with its long seacoast-like range proto-nomads landbridging to the Alkan-Yukon fields, had he the renowned polymath T.J. trusted his naturally swiveling instinct finding not just slender black-and-white solutions at any hour of his epic day/night but oceans to bestride with a compass whose points were out of sight of each other wading in the watery sphere; hence had T.J. surveyed on Euclid’s drowning angular shoulders such sunlight shed in Earth’s seas as to discern long before the synthesizing of uranium that flesh itself, beneath the skin but even in the varicolored skin with all its history of light, if barraged at its nucleus (take for example the seven hundred individuals that were the nucleus of the Georgia Colony), could blow sky-high, clouding the horizons of events themselves — and the whole shmeer turns upon how we (a natural senate maybe only in birth and potential) apply our knowledge of the light (for is the tune the secret force celled in the noise or is the noise what waits in the tune’s fine track to blow us away together on Independence Day?).