Moon-Bow

If I told you about moon-bows
I could not blame your disbelief.
Some things are too much
Like metaphors to be trusted,
Or maybe they are simply too much to explain
But the point is phenomena
Can be shared if we suspend ourselves,
The same way the idea of unicorns
Might turn a child's thoughts
Away from the colorless certainty of right now.
I have seen a Moon-Bow
Stretched over the darkness like electric ribs
Anchored in the teeth of an Alaskan storm.
Our ship road on the lips of thirty-foot commas
Yawing and pitching down the far sides
Until the ocean closed like a mouth over the gunwales
And the bow rose to shake itself of foam and salt.
The deck-lights poked fingers through horizontal rain
And on the horizon spectral bands
Of silver and ice-blue bent across the heavens,
The vaulted dome of an empyrean cathedral
Splitting the night into realms of
Chaos and preternatural solemnity.

And what shall I report upon having slipped through
The ghostly rings? That I now believe?
That I have unlocked the fables of my youth
And tossed the key into the velvet waves?

— James Norman Kerns
"Moonbow" comes from Alaska, written during a storm
off of Kodiak Island