Suddenly the moon

From a note I scribbled early this year: “joy through the mere act of seeing,” Max Frisch. I’ve never read the Swiss writer Max Frisch, don’t recall the context of that note, but it inspired me to record moments of joy in the mere act of experiencing the world. Here are a few I captured in 2015.

A Siamese cat sits elegantly on a high fence post overlooking backyards.

At a cabin on the river, I take my coffee out to the deck, the planks in early sun already dry, those in shadow still darkly glistening with last night’s rain. When I raise my heavy mug, steam rises in misty swirls, tiny droplets of moisture glittering in a shaft of sun.

Young couple walking, arms around each other, Dalmatian prancing before them on its leash.

A gutted old house, first floor windows and doors boarded, the upper ones open to the air, revealing what once was a bedroom fireplace, its wooden mantle holding a blue vase of dead flowers.

Coming home from a Highlands poetry reading, at the top of Speer where downtown spreads below and the wide plain rolls east to an indiscernible horizon and suddenly the moon, gigantic and golden, begins to rise through thin clouds.

At the end of the week we have Writer Appreciation in this 8^th grade elective. Each week a student brings a book they like and snacks, reads us a few pages while we munch on donuts or tangerines. Colin was late. When he arrived everyone was nibbling and Gwen was reading the passage from The Shining in which Jack removes the magneto from the snowmobile to keep his family from leaving. Kali, sitting next to the remaining snacks, fixed a plate, and Nathaniel rose to take it to Colin, silently and unprompted, while Gwen continued reading.

A breezy jean jacket kind of day. As I pull into the restaurant parking lot the jazz tune ends with perfect timing and KUVO’s announcer says he’s giving a shout-out to some people who are streaming us in Istanbul.

June poppies: their intense red cannot be contained, edges blur in the sun.

Driving east on 26^th, a lovely long-legged black girl on a bike flies across the road a block in front of me, leaning high over the handlebars, grinning, focused on her objective, an equally beautiful black woman waiting on the sidewalk, smiling. As she swoops to a neat stop, the girl reaches to place her fingers on the woman’s cheek.

A group of aspens, for aspens like to grow no other way, with bright mounds of impatiens, pink and white and scarlet, planted in the shade of their silvery trunks.

Last year the wall clock in the creative writing classroom was broken. The expectation that it might be fixed over summer was dashed. Timing is everything in the classroom. Out of habit I kept glancing fruitlessly at the clock when deciding about wrapping up an exercise. Today I looked at it to see a sign taped to its face: “Time is an illusion.”

Afternoon sun through white sheers, the room softly golden.

Our brilliant full moon was tinged ochre by the haze of fires in Oregon. Emily posted a photo of her New York full moon, asked people to post theirs and moons from across the country and world obligingly showed up within a few hours. La misma luna.

The same moon.