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On the last evening of summer,
beginning a little past 7:30p.m.,
David C. Fischer spent almost
exactly ten minutes admiring
a slender crescent of moon
as it rapidly slid earthward
in an ever-darkening dusk.
For almost the entire ten minutes,
Fischer, a photographer, stared
not directly at the western sky
but at a smudged plate of glass
about the size of a playing card,
the viewing screen of his tripod-
mounted Canon digital camera.
Beneath an oak beside the mailbox
at the westmost end of the gravel
driveway of his dad’s Fjord, Wisconsin,
farm, Fischer took twenty-two photos
of that moon. Only one of them, the first,
he judged “publishable.” (Another, the
final frame, we are posting on this page.)
Summer’s last full day was Thursday.
Friday evening was cloudy. Fischer
did not get to see the slightly fatter
crescent that went down somewhat
later in a somewhat shorter day in
a somewhat darker sky. But in his
memory Fischer cherished again that
last setting moon of this summer, which
then led him also to recall a certain
other silvered, slivered summer moon
of many years ago, one that dipped
into the sea, off a beach on Maui.
And that Maui moon led, in Fischer’s mind,
to another dark sky, a moonless dome
of deepest inky blue, unphotographable or,
in any event, unphotographed by Fischer,
a sky, he thinks, perhaps unmatched for
beauty in all the years and all the other skies
he has ever seen. That particular blue-black
sky was over Barstow, California. It made
Fischer gasp as he stepped down from a
Greyhound bus and lifted his eyes to the
heavens at a rest stop on a trip of which,
Fischer claims, he no longer possesses
even one single other clear recollection.
♦
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