Lytton Bell Joins the Brontës and Galatea on a "Moon Boat"

Lytton Bell has published five books: A Path before Winter (1998), The Book of Chaps (2002), Nectar (2011), Poetica Erotica, volume one (2012), and Body Image (2013). She has won seven poetry contests and been the featured reader at many California literary venues.  Her work has appeared in many publications.  As a teenager, Lytton won a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, where she studied with Deb Burnham and the late Len Roberts.  Lytton graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College.  Contact her at lytton_bell@hotmail.com.

Moon's First Voyage,
W. Heath Robinson, 1916

                  Moon Boat

Don’t hitch your wagon to that star!

Climb on and let’s row this glowing sliver of moon

through a shimmering lake of milky starlight

Lean your back against this cratered curve

Pull these oars made from beams of purest moonlight

Did you feel us glide between Saturn’s rainbow rings?

If we come to rest near the brimming cup

of the Big Dipper

Let’s dive out for a quick bath

and a peek at whatever Orion keeps hidden

beneath his stiff scabbard

Then board our luminous vessel again

though we have no map or compass

no sails, no provisions

and nowhere to be

except here

Galatean Scream

Pygmalion and Galatea,
Jean-Leon Gerome, 1890

I’ve become a master at

standing still

at math in the head

and triangulating even at

vast distances, in the dark

YOU

overtake me with a blast of wind

giggling dangerously

slicing through the heart of my sleepless imaginings

promising daybreak

crumbling this immense solitude

digging open trenches of buried sunbeam that

crest over the ridge of blue silence as our

senses speak

I am only alive where you touch me

How to be Charlotte Brontë

The Bronte Sisters,
Branwell Bronte, 1834

Desire more worldly experience than you possess

Never settle for knitting stockings, making puddings

playing on the piano or embroidering bags

Tear meat with your teeth

Write less like a man than a fallen seraph

with a message from the eternal throne

Find a pilot in your seducer

Go down in love

Listen to the bustle of the busy world, towns

regions brimming with life you sense but never see

Hear them singing to you, ringing your cranial bell

Let your heart heave with exultant movement

Expand with life; open your inward ear to a tale without end

a tale you create and perpetually narrate

tempered in an actual flame

Abandon visionary woe

Grasp mortal happiness, even when it sinks

sharp small animal mouths into your skin

Even if you must blacken yourself out of Eden’s family portrait

Sit quietly with apparitions, near the window

in the parlor beside the charred Horse Chestnut tree

Let ghosts probe you with hands colder than wind

Want them

Don’t ever go to bed while sunrise enfolds moonset

Cloak naked feet beneath your long dress

the purple one that bares

your tattered hands

And when the long night cracks open at last

like a raw egg across a plate of sky

let the dawn come in you so hard that

you know it is the first time

daylight ever really mattered

(This poem was first published in Convergence, Summer 2004 

http://www.convergence-journal.com/summer04/poetry_charlotte.htm)


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