Time, the Rose, and the Moon
What year will it be when you read this? That is a question I would like to ask you, even though you cannot answer me. It is the year 2020 as I write this, but soon it will be 2021, then 2022, 2023, 2024. You get the picture. Before we know it, it will be 2050, or the year 3000. 2065. I myself will be almost dead in that year, and perhaps you will be, too. Because I was born in 1978, what are the chances I will even see 2060? Rather small. Things happen so fast and we will never know the point of it.
What day and time were you born? The perfect timing of your birth is very special—not only because it can tell us your astrological sign (and thus your personality) but because it can tell us what time you were meant to exist in. Why are you here? What road were you meant to travel? There is an importance to each of us being here. We will never know exactly what it is or why.
Or maybe there is no importance to it at all. There is joy in this idea, too.
Sometimes if I listen carefully I feel I can hear you answering these questions. Although you may not answer them directly in words, but instead in images, like dreams do.
I once had a dream after my friend Lucie died she was waving at me. Beckoning, she seemed to say, I’m here. It was a greeting. Once I came closer to her, she got smaller and smaller. Soon she was so small that she disappeared into the netting of a chair seat. Then I couldn’t find her.
In the morning I woke up and drove in a car to the airport. In the sky I saw a plane so far away. All of those people still existed in that plane, but they seemed small to me because of my perspective and how far away they were. It was so tiny, that plane and the people, and I realized death was that. That when people die they go so far away they become small. But maybe they aren’t completely gone. Maybe we transform into forms so small and only notice their size, but the size intersects with time and somewhere we are all neither perceptibly big or imperceptibly small. Like a baby starts from one cell and grows and a dead body disperses. Perhaps this dispersal or force of connection has to do with time and not space at all.
Like when I am in the Dream House, it is always a portal. The energy of the magenta-purple light, where the possibility of love exists once again.
Perhaps when a person is channeling something, like a poem, there is a condensed sense of the spatial, or a condensed space, like the old ways we have understood a black hole. Where time and smallness all become one.
Our ways of processing time have to do with the brain and memory. Because I have always been a poet, I feel that I must have been born with a very intimate relationship to time. In the fact that time is not linear, and that it is bending and twisting back upon itself. Where the past is in the future. Or that the future exists in us now. That is the snake.
Because I am a poet, I often get into conversations with people who think poetry must be something done outside of time. Maybe this is because there is the false belief among many people that poetry is only for a few and that these few exist without specific time. Maybe now these certain conversations are about the idea of not having any specific trappings of our contemporary time. That a rose must be the eternal rose. Maybe this is because there is the false belief that poetry is difficult and that it is only written for these very few, shuttling thru time and waiting to meet each other, to see the eternal rose. Maybe it is because there is the idea that poetry is only for the self and ghosts and so there is no point in making it part of its own time.
Because what then of the rose that is more beautiful being born on April 26, 1917, less than two months before the birth of my father? Which split its seeds to make the roses after it. And what then of the moon? And then is the moon the eternal moon.
When I think of the moon I cannot but help but think of the 1960s. The Space Age. After everything, I cannot answer if we have gone there or have we not. The moon in my private imagination is so much wider than in the pictures I have seen of it on a TV screen or now online. The moon in my imagination is a place with many neon-yellow and neon-green trees, not just rocks dressed in beige. There is a neon-orange bird that flies there. It is like the collage I made in 2006 out of some impetus. Nothing more than to make it and hang it on the wall. Now it hangs in my daughter’s room, tempting her with the moon. No, I don’t believe that the moon is uninhabitable, as they say. It is a place to go to. Where we can live with very bright oxygen. No, it’s true—I think it is a place to go to. But I do not think we have been there. And I think that my vision of it in neon yellow and green with the neon-orange bird is the very real stuff of nightmares, because it is more real than the image of the landscape of the moon that is fake and that we have been shown.
Perhaps I have this neon vision of the moon because as a little girl I read a book that was called This Place Has No Atmosphere, and it was about people who lived on the moon. At least that’s how I remember the book—I haven’t read it since then. It was the 1980s in the middle of the country and I didn’t believe in much, as I still don’t. A mass delusion of antidelusion of one of myself as a child and now even though I remember her, I am not her anymore. But even then as a girl I knew the moon was not what they told me it was, but something alive and important. Like a Western landscape plunged into eternal darkness. But with the sky rich and pliable, a jelly darkness, where new things can always potentially occur. The richest land of otherworldly minerals. Where we plant the garden of our thoughts and they really do grow.
Perhaps believing that we have landed on the moon is like our need to believe in anything that is part of an organized religion. Isn’t it the same instinct to believe in a particular god or a specific morality—to collectively agree that what we see is real even though it is impossibly so? To want—no, need—to believe in the eternal rose versus just the rose.
Last night I did not dream of lions but a very dark snake. It was the color of the deepest green of forest trees right before the clearing.
The other night I had a dream of my friend Max, who died in early fall close to four years ago. In the dream he was his same personality and I know he was telling me something potentially important, but I still can’t remember what he said. Maybe it is not the words that are important, but the images in the dream. But the only image now I have from it is of his face.
Sometimes when I have been obsessed—no, fixated—on a particular person or situation and I am stuck by myself for days analyzing what has been said, I ask my best friend, Eric, to help me decode the wealth of language that has littered my brain. And always, he gives the same answer—that it’s pointless to care. And that to care about some situation or someone who doesn’t care to the same extent is like waking up and being half in the dream so much that you want to fix something in the dream. But once the dream has happened, you can’t go back. It is truly a worthless—no, not worthless, no, it’s an unreal situation.
Time is potentially an accident and the opposite of this idea is fate. And maybe the moon is the most fated thing of all. The moon is just a dream. A dream that you can’t ever fix.
Two nights after I dreamt of Max, I was walking past the living room in my apartment and I felt a presence and I said to myself and to the air “Max?” But the voice said, “I’m not Max.” Though I think it was actually him, trying to tease me. Then I went to sleep under the glowing turquoise globe.
It is only as I am writing this now that I remember in the living room on a shelf is a ring that Max gave me of the Ouroboros.
In the summer of 2016, I went to a gallery and saw a painting called The Rose of Nowhere with my friend who was friends with the gallery owner. I remember it was summer and we went there because we were going to write a book together about the moon and the paintings in the exhibit had moons. And we thought about writing a long essay called The Rose of Nowhere, and started on it but didn’t finish it. Maybe we never will. No, I know it—we never will. But now there will be these words, as a way to thank my friend for affecting my life.
The eternal rose lives in a very definite space. We all know what that rose looks like. It is the stylized rose, but not the bleeding one we hold in our hands that wilts in a day. The eternal rose does not have a sweet smell. It has the sweetest smell. But not the sweetest smell ever. The sweetest smell ever is love.
The rose of nowhere has the sweetest smell ever. It is the rose of our time and the rose of the future and it is the life-giving rose. It exists in no place. It grows on the moon.
What is the atmosphere like at night on the moon? Is it like the air in LA when you are in love? I was scared of it at first, the idea of no air on the moon, but then I thought, Maybe not, and then maybe I was again, but nevertheless I filled the tub with sands and grasses. It was good for it and it thrived and it got bigger. I wanted things not to be, but the snake kept growing. I think I knew it would one day overtake me and then I woke up from the dream that was my life.
What is the snake? What starts in one place and curves into another? Like when Jack Spicer said, “Poetry ends like a rope,” did he really mean love? Like love, what is the beginning or the ending of a snake. I don’t know where I began, but I move on, one day this life ending in a seeming flick of the dark-night tail but what I really am living on and on in the neon-yellow trees.
Who knows if I will be a poet past this life, but in this one I am certain that is my purpose, in spite of poetry hating me from the very beginning. And if I am a poet now, then I will continue to make poems where all appearances are illusory. Not just the public body or public atmosphere. Not just the internal organs, with their very quiet lub-dub. Not to make two or three hearts from one. But that to know beyond the wall there lies the snake who is not the enemy but is only you listening is to see what the lion is. The neon-infused snake who waits for you in the dream. Where they’re here, they’re here. That’s what the snakes say. They say, I’m here and I am surely not your friend, but not your enemy either. They’re here, and they say they’re here. I’m here, I’m here, they say. That’s what the snakes say.
The rose is the snake. There is a rose of nowhere and a snake of nowhere. But we won’t ever touch them, in the same way we won’t ever touch the sand of the moon.
We have entered a time when things could be the mirror of us. Will it be our natural politicians, our world leaders, who mimic us? Will our mirror be the public or the private one? Can poetry and art ever be safe again? The quarter coated in green, sitting on the cylindrical beryl pedestal. The thing that found us with green eyes, that looks like a dog, his coat dressed in green. Everything on the beryl and we are so near it, dressed in diamonds on the gray carpet, like nothing you have ever seen or believe in. The crystals.
Poets and artists have voices and we must listen to them—what they say is important. It is as simple as that, but I am sure we will do our best to make it more complicated. It is the year 2020 as I write this, but if I am lucky, it will be 2075 when you read this, exactly one hundred years after the death of my grandmother, Dorothea, whom I never met. We live now so that we can live later. And poetry is the eternal summer no matter what. Poetry is everything. Words just meant to jut into the landscape. We speak now so that you will listen eternally.
So listen to me. Do not live your life without art, color, or ghosts. We are all here together, one thing. Time is meaningless. The point of life is beauty. Make beauty and we will forget ourselves and time. Live now, I tell you, and listen for the rose.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Shining (2023) and MOTHER (2026). She is also the author of the prose book Animal (2019) and a future book about Sappho, as well as the editor of Essays (2023) and a coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (2013). Her first novel, Katie, is forthcoming. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review, among other places.