Moon Party Song

​California Coastal Dwellers have made an art form from the rising of the full moon. They say it started when, as one harvest moon rose, a hard-of-hearing farmer sat under his arbor with its grapes about to burst. His friends hauled in their music, started a blaze from scrap wood, staked out some turf, strummed like monkeys on steel wires or picked out melodies with tortoise-shell shards. Others blew into mouth organs or through hollowed-out branches. One beat on wood blocks with sticks and another fiddled on catgut strings.
 
Some opened their throats like bawling songbirds and swished around the rim drunk on motion, while others urged their hands onto the stretched skins of dead cattle. Dogs on the periphery howled in four-part harmony.
 
All leapt internally because leaping was the reason for breathing, All were trapped
since being trapped was a prerequisite to this rhythmic bliss. Those in the center wept, knowing that never might they hear such ingenious, elusive music—until the next full birthing of the moon.
 
No one asked where the song came from, knowing only the moon-burst sky would keep playing them too flawlessly for anyone to decode any stray notes. Except the shocked farmer who, after warm rivers of wax ran out of both his ears, heard every complex note begin with a low dissonance, instantly becoming as full and perfectly ripe as the grapes directly above his head.