In this week’s poem, Jay Franzel tells a story of a night hike, a great darkness, and an all-encompassing light. I love this poem’s vivid and tenderly observed details of myth, celestial bodies, and one human’s climb up and down the height.

Jay Franzel lives in Wayne, and helps organize the Bookey Readings, a monthly poetry series in Winthrop.

New Moon on Tap Mountain

The Old Tap Mountain Road is sometimes steep,
pitted, spilling loose rock, but halfway up one night
Kaplan turned around and walked backwards.

Tell me if I veer too far to either side —
knees bent, hands out on angle,
my light trained around his feet.

At the top, we switched off our lights.
The new moon over Tap Mountain
was a dark circle inside its sickle
of silver light.

Rabbi Vital wrote,
Once, there was nothing but endless light.
To create worlds like ours, God drew all the light
to the edge, the vast circle inside flooding with darkness.

The breeze circling Tap Mountain
draped our shoulders like a cold shroud.
We switched on our lights.

Walking back down, Kaplan would stop,
stare ahead, as if trying to see
what was out there, beyond the light,

that slender sickle overhead
ready to widen
or disappear.

– Jay Franzel

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “New Moon on Tap Mountain,” copyright ©2024 by Jay Franzel, appears by permission of the author.