the light, the moonlight, es gisher, lusniak gisher
I love the moon. No, let me take that back. I do not know the moon — I know the light in the sky; the feeling I get when I am all by myself, walking in a Michigan forest; the happiness moonlight brings me. One of my favorite sing-along songs, Me and the Moon, by Gaelic Storm, contains the wonderful lines, "Me and the moon stayed up all night;/ I brought the whiskey! He brought the light!/ A' quarter to three, we're feeling fine when the sun comes up I'm gonna miss my friend moonshine."
Even the darker side of luna, the Dionysian madness moonlight was suppose to bring, is a friend. As in the poem, Purple Valleys, by the quasi-Romantic poet Madison Julius Cawein, moonlight approaches, covering "Night with sensuous nudity./ Lo! again I hear her pant/ Breasting through the dewy glooms" — and yet for all the romance we have piled upon the moon there are times when what moonlight uncovers for us in the dark is so monstrous, so nightmarish, that we can never turn to it again as a metaphor. I found reference to the moonlight, lusniak gisher in Armenian, on jazz singer extraordinaire Datevik Hovanesian's CD, Listen to my Heart/ Lsir Sirts. I urge everyone to listen to her work, at least once.
Something is burning through these dry desert
streams. A thing – glowing, grating, fluoresce.
A storm is burning through these dreams. The dirt
from these cattle cars. It is a cloudless
night, I can see – no. I cannot speak this
language. These dreams. A scream. I cannot speak.
Things are burning. This sight is both a bliss
and a curse. Sight is a curse. I am weak,
moonlight, lusniak gisher; blind these screams
from me. Blind me. I loved you – now farewell.
I loved you, once, now you twist and deform,
moonlight, lusniak gisher – all my dreams;
this sound of flesh, light and firestorm; this smell
of fat melting and consuming firestorm.