May Swenson - Landing on the Moon
When in the mask of night there shone that cut,
we were riddled. A probe reached down
and stroked some nerve in us,
as if the glint from a wizard's eye, of silver,
slanted out of the mask of the unknown-
pit of riddles, the scratch-marked sky.
When, albino bowl on cloth of jet,
it spilled its virile rays,
our eyes enlarged, our blood reared with the waves.
We craved its secret, but unreachable
it held away from us, chilly and frail.
Distance kept it magnate. Enigma made it white.
When we learned to read it with our rod,
reflected light revealed
a lead mirror, a bruised shield
seamed with scars and shadow-soiled.
A half faced sycophant, its glitter borrowed,
rode around our throne.
On the moon there shines earth light
as moonlight shines upon the earth…
If on its obsidian we set our weightless foot,
and sniff no wind, and lick no rain
and feel no gauze between us and the Fire
will we trot its grassless skull, sick for the homelike shade?
Naked to the earth-beam we shall be,
who have arrived to map an apparition,
who walk upon the forehead of a myth.
Can flesh rub with symbol? If our ball
be iron, and not light, our earliest wish
eclipses. Dare we land upon a dream?
May Swenson, a poetic predecessor of Marianne Moore, creates a poem that luxuriates in a full-bodied sensuality that really serves as a kind of displacement. The poem picks up from what Simone De Beauvoir called "a world where men compel [women] to assume the status of the Other" and it takes as its explicit subject the moon (which is often used as a symbol of the feminine and also occupies the 'weaker' end against its binary opposite sun.) An irony of the poem is that the moon first reaches down to "probe...some nerve in us" and is only then responded to by the male instinct which "reads it with our rod" - all we can glimpse in the moon is ourselves in a borrowed or "reflected light" and the "bruised shield" of the moon symbolizes the defense system which creates power through defining itself. Both the moon and the earth are lit by "glitter borrowed" and yet there is an independent exchange in which moon and earth bleed into each other, seek to define each other. When Swenson writes that "distance kept it magnate [and] enigma made it white" she is describing the fundamentally opaque nature of the distant Other which offers no solution in and of itself and so becomes the grounds (or scaffolding) for constructed and oppressive belief systems (even to translate the moon by the rod is to subject it to the dominant.) Butler talks of the paralyzing "unanticipated agency, of a female "object" who inexplicably returns the glance, reverses the gaze" (2540) and yet Swenson reverses this formula in having the moon first glint it's "wizard's eye" which destabilizes even the fixed position of the oppressors themselves. It is interesting how the sun is removed from the equation and an earth which is lit not only by the sun but by the enigma of the moon defines itself not by the certainty of that sunlight but by the mystery of the moon (which fundamentally is earth's own.) Butler says that "gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real" (2541) and sex seems to be all construction in Swenson's poem as well - the moon spills "virile rays" and yet "on the moon there shines earth light as moonlight shines upon the earth" which constitutes not a fixed sexuality but a sexual tension that is as difficult to pinpoint as myth itself. As far back as Zoroaster the western world has been defined by the fundamental split in its binaries and Beauvoir bemoans the very feminists who seek to define themselves against males instead of position themselves in an "indefinitely open future" of becoming: she says, "what we need is an angel - neither man nor woman - but where shall we find one"? Butler updates this formula by describing "the body as a construct of suspect generality" (2542) and it is also so in Swenson's poem where nothing remains in the end (of all the highly-sexualized symbolism) but the dream we might land upon. The eloquent conclusion clarifies the immense freedom inherit in the feminist project:
"Can flesh rub with symbol? If our ball
be iron, and not light, our earliest wish
eclipses. Dare we land upon a dream?"
... which might be another way of saying, "if everything is constructed, then our dreams are no further (and perhaps even closer) to us than the approximations we try to describe them with." It is an open philosophy which privileges life, change, and the freedom inherit in our "ball [of] iron" self-referential slavery. We're already the Moonmen (and Sunwomen.) Hit it Bessy -
Butler. "Gender Trouble." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Beauvoir, Simone de. "Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, Woman as Other 1949." www.marxists.org. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm>
Swenson, May. "Classical Poem: Landing on the Moon by May Swenson at All poetry." allpoetry.com. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://allpoetry.com/opoem/30779-May-Swenson-Landing-on-the-Moon>
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