From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary voyaging sequences "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca," Ron Smith's Moon Road embodies the experiences and some of the more elusive lessons of marriage, fatherhood, teaching, sports, and travel. Domestic poems give way to poems of pilgrimage and witness, to poems of literary homage and metaphysical questioning. A mind nurtured in the mid-twentieth-century Deep South drifts north and west and finally abroad, and sometimes into visionary, mysterious pasts. With skeptical reverence, the poems hunger for and dramatize a search for immanence and transcendence. Many poems examine the fear of meaninglessness, the griefs of separation and alienation, and the limits as well as the powers of language.

A full moon disentangles
from the petroleum plant
as we pull out of the harbor,

rocking like childhood
toward Ithaca. Jets bank in and out
of an airport I've never seen.

The deck blooms backpacks,
sleeping bags, a few tents.
The ship shudders and turns, makes
straight for the moon.

We're riding the moon road into a cave.

We shake and shake our heads, but 
it's still there, black tunnel
the moon mines paving our path with gold.

We climb out of the wind, 
into our bunks, you above,
me below, rocked to sleep, chaste,
sky sister, tide brother,

light and dark, dark and light.

From "Moon Road" published in Moon Roadby Ron Smith.
Copyright © 2007 by Ron Smith. All rights reserved.