POUR, TEAR, CARVE

MOON WIND OBJECT

By Kim Roberts

—after Anne Truitt’s Moon Wind Object, 1969 (after Neil Armstrong’s lunar landing)

Pearl, eggshell, cream, vanilla, rice.
As if borne by a terrible wind, she careened,
learned to pay attention, attracted grace
wind-lapped from childhood’s lattices. She dreamed
in cotton, ivory, alabaster, frost.
Sanded, reapplied, sanded again.
In the moon’s exosphere all weather’s lost:
there are no storms. There’s no such thing as wind.
And every wavelength in the spectrum’s light
combines into one possibility:
a shade, not a color. There is no white.
Illuminated fields. A property.
Imagined color, in imagined wind.
Her column hums a hypothetical hymn.

Kim Roberts is one of five LGBTQ+ Poets-in-Residence at the Arts Club of Washington for 2023. She is the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC and editor of two anthologies of DC poets, most recently By Broad Potomac’s Shore, selected by the Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program. Her sixth book of poems, Corona/Crown, is a cross-disciplinary collaboration with photographer Robert Revere (WordTech Editions, 2023). More information at KimRoberts.org.