Luminous
(after Tina Mion’s “The Weight of the Moon”)
My father asked, me a mere slip innocent of gray girl, whether we should leave my mother, his wife. What had I already borne? I said, Stay. Knowing nothing of what I would carry.
Or its undertow.
The hoodoos rise as I cross the plateau, between a life in formation and one in retreat. Time-eroded into monuments banded furrowed gouged patched in blood-browns, a great pearl hovers between them. The starless cerulean of the sea, the plateau millennia ago, ebbs into dawn’s egg-blue light; washes across her canvas above the blackened rust scratched out of the void.
Meanwhile, the mesas glow.
And below, she skulks across the gritty grassland, between ways of being. A crescent cast too soon into fullness, she wears the horizon on her back, bent crone-like, mouth set, bearing the full weight of the moon.
High up in the night sky.
You are luminous, the women said, the morning after we shared our despair, our lost will to live, beside a northern inland sea pulsing dark and deep. They were breathless, faces sublime. I was stunned. Pay attention to the moon, they also said.
It moves the oceans.
Her dusky tunic rides up as she folds over one knee, brush-strokes feathering a brighter-white at the shoulder before coursing down her back, alighting on her calf. Brown glow-spattered hair cascades forward, as pale features, not quite formed, gaze sidelong into the past, for the reasons for the weight. Planting one slippered foot firmly in the dark earth, the other whisks her body onward from behind.
Wearing the moon around her ankles.
Not lunatic, but lunar, we face you, without question, sure in our waxing and waning. We cycle through and out of fullness, in perpetuity, dark giving way to light. Fixed in paint and imagination, we ascend and descend across the high desert. Ever in motion.
Luminous. Ageless as we go.
Camille LeFevre, of Northern Arizona, practices and teaches ekphrasis, and writes creative nonfiction. She’s the 2023 recipient of the Scuglik Memorial Residency in Ekphrastic Writing with Write On, Door County. Her work has been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Herstry, and Hungry Mind Review. She’s an avid hiker, cold-water swimmer, and pickleball player.
