According to local legend, Theodore Roethke, upon hearing word that he had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, turned to the class he was teaching (someone had popped in to tell him the news) and cried, "To the Moon!"
Meaning the Blue Moon Tavern, situated exactly one mile from the University of Washington campus in compliance with the law of the time which did not allow a tavern any closer to its halls of learning. The Blue Moon, of course, was and is a hall of learning of its own. Things I learned there would fill a book, and in time maybe they will. The City of Seattle has, quite rightly, named the alley running along one side of the Moon Roethke Mews.
In the meantime, it's winter in Seattle, and while this poem of Roethke's does not immediately reference that fact, it seems appropriate.
In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.