Flies, Dogs, Nick Drake & the Pink Moon

Strange face

With your eyes

So pale and sincere

What do flies see with enormous eyes covering

their heads, thousands of tiny eyeballs creating

a disco-ball mosaic world? To be sure, they cannot see

the color red . . .

Saw it written and I saw it say

Pink moon is on its way

. . . which means they wouldn’t experience the heightened

emotions that many humans feel under a pink moon.

Assuming flies have emotions, which they might. Or not.

Black eyed dog he called at my door

The black eyed dog he called for more

A black eyed dog he knew my name

Dogs can’t see red, either, nor can they see pink, a lighter

shade of red - their pink moon is a muted gray or beige.

(or greige). We know they experience joy and happiness

and connect with us through their twin, non-compound,

overflowing-with-warmth eyes, most deeply during their night

of the greige (Read: pink) moon.

And it’s a pink moon

Hey, it’s a pink moon

Pink, pink, pink, pink, pink moon

Wildly talented & wildly troubled Brit singer Nick Drake

did not own a dog, black-eyed or not. The dog-song lyrics

might echo Churchill’s ‘visits from the black dog’: his darkest

times of what we now call bipolar disorder.

Time has told me

You’re a rare, rare find

A troubled cure

For a troubled mind

It’s obvious that Drake connected to spring’s first

full moon. His final album - astonishingly recorded

in just two evenings (during a depression-free window

in his ongoing brain-battles) - is named Pink Moon.

When the bird has flown

Got no-one to call your own

Got no place to call your home

When the bird has flown

Though a gifted guitarist and songwriter, he played

only a few dozen gigs total: coupled with his near-

monosyllabic shyness, performing cost too much

in mental effort and energy. Little wonder

he was relatively unknown.

Time has told me

There’s really no way

Of ending your troubles

With things you can say

Contrasting with his earlier work, Pink Moon is austere:

acoustic guitar and baritone voice (with soft falsetto

for intimate and haunting moments). The compressed

lyrics are a kind of (pardon me, Basho) indie-folk haiku.

His music is gentle and ethereal as well as (it seems obvious)

a cry for help.

And time has told me

Not to ask for more

The album was released in 1972, two years before Nick Drake,

tormented with a passel of mental illnesses, took his own life.

It was November, at his parent’s house in Birmingham - 

Bach on the turntable, Camus (who said “. . .always flies

and itches . . . why life is so hard to live”) by the bed,

an English winter lurking around the corner. He was twenty-six.

When the light has flown

Tell me all that you may know

Show me what you have to show

Won’t you come and say

If you know the way to blue?

The italicized text are song lyrics from Drake’s three albums:

• Five Leaves Left, Island Records, 1969

• Bryter Layter, Island Records, 1971

• Pink Moon, Island Records, 1972

Kim Peter Kovac has worked nationally and internationally in theater for young audiences and was longtime Artistic Director of Kennedy Center TYA, where he commissioned and produced 100+ new plays and musicals for children and young people ages 0-18.  He is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and recently received a lifetime achievement award from ASSITEJ, the international association of theaters for young audiences. He has an MFA in Directing from the University of Texas at Austin and post-graduate studies in poetry with The Poetry Barn (West Hurley, NY) and The Writer’s Center Bethesda, MD.  A Bit Left of Straight Ahead (2024) is his second poetry collection, following Border Sounds: Poems & Dispatches from Other Timezones (2021).