Daniel Halpern’s “Moon over Brooklyn”

The LARB Quarterly no. 44, “Pressure,” presents a new poem by Daniel Halpern.

By Daniel HalpernApril 16, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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Moon over Brooklyn

Up there, a faintly salmon-colored lunar tablet—
A Latin coin, backlit and acned.

She is in front of you, directly,
Looking into your eyes.

She shines over Hart Crane’s bridge
Delineated with the lights

Of impatient traffic illuminating the ways home.
Is there a background of the sensory?

A gentle music playing high
Over the bridge? A woman sings tonight

With the full moon ablaze in a cloudy,
Post-storm sky. Rita Coolidge singing

“Fool That I Am,” an elegy, something mournful.
She hangs there, a couplet in the round,

Like the voice of Propertius, singing couplets to
The woman who caught him with her eyes.

A palette of pale, hung lowish in a sky
Simultaneously ancient and simply tonight.

A trick of the moon, her lunar magic.
Maybe I’m crazy, maybe losing ground?

I tried to make an understanding of her
Illuminations tonight, fool that I am.
 

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Featured image: James Nasmyth. Copernicus, 1867. Margaret Day Blake and Harold Joachim Endowments, Art Institute of Chicago (2000.406). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed April 11, 2025. Image has been cropped.