Grady Chambers

Here is a favorite poem by Grady Chambers, “A Story About the Moon,” published initially in The Iowa Review and later in the book North American Stadiums. Grady Chambers is one of the finest and most powerful living practitioners of poetic black magic.  He writes about passion and loss: about teenagers longing to be grown up and powerful, of what remains after the death of a close friend, of a miscarriage of a baby conceived with a first love and how it can only be remembered through incantation, about the bonds between sons and fathers and grandfathers, and always about the force and limits of language itself.

Grady Chambers

A Story About the Moon

I’d been on this road before. Last year lit with wildflowers,

this year the hills stripped bare, baked by sun. It spills out

of Los Angeles like a long black tongue, then nothing 

for 500 miles, just dust and shadows of cattle-sheds past towns

so small I turned off just to see who lives there. 

My uncle in Oregon told me he got lost once, saw a sign 

for a gimp barn beside a creek beneath some pines: an hour

down the road he turned around. He liked the land, he said;

he bought it, never left. I think about that sometimes: happenstance 

leading to a life; one set of faces replaced 

by others. A girl I loved told me no ones knows for certain 

how the moon was formed. That there was earth 

where now there are oceans, that a burning rock 

slammed into us and the displaced land

became the moon. Back then she could toss a penny 

from her bedroom and hit my window, 

we lived that close. I remember one winter 

passing the exit peeling off towards Cleveland. 

She was living there with her father; by then we hardly spoke.

I thought—if I turned off, what would happen;

if I stopped? I think that’s what I mean 

about happenstance: where you are and how

you came to be there. And how cold the roads looked. 

The ramp and the overpass and the thin metal

of the exit sign. How that day I just kept going.

For more about Grady Chambers’ and his poetry, see his website https://gradychambers.com.