We have a new moon that shines over us ever since the h-shaped asteroid collided with the old moon, lost the right half of its h and became, quite simply, a white spear in the sky that goes by many names. In my city it’s called the New Satellite or the mono-moon, and a few poetic types have made much of this moon in their songs and murals, some invoking the aesthetics of science and others the age-old language of love (which some of them say will never die as it never was born), but as for myself I am still trying to get my head and eyeballs used to this newfound object in the sky, rather as a person than a poet, and even Gigiglio my cousin, pardon his nickname, who is about the furthest thing from a poet, says it’s going to be many years before he gets used to it—and every time he looks up in the sky and sees it, he shudders and wonders whether the end is nearer than he previously thought, whether more are coming, a whole sky full of massive moons such that night won’t be dark anymore, or aliens come, as others say (but Gigiglio comes from a long line of worriers and has always said things like that, even before the new moon)—and, on the whole, when you look at the whole situation straight, the monolithic moon is getting so much attention that the old moon seems to have taken a backseat, almost forgotten.
It’s got me thinking about things that are completely unfathomable, such as the human voice, the existence of language, and the skeleton of the geriatric hermit that my mom and her friends found on a hiking trip when I was a child: the body, fry pan in one hand and a pistol in the other, who died in a reclined posture against the side of his viney shed sometime in winter, bullet to the brain and no one knows why or when, no one had any answers and we will always wonder about him and what he felt up there on the mountain, even now, Gigiglio and I still talk about it…