'The Moon at Times Is Hunched and Old'

A few weeks after my boss hired me in 2006 to work as a science writer for Rice University, we met to informally talk about how things were going. Both of us were pleased and knew we had made a good choice. We already liked and trusted each other. Ann paid me an odd compliment that remains the finest I’ve ever received: “I’m glad I hired someone who knows the meaning of ‘gibbous.’” 

At the time, the university maintained an online weather station wonderfully stocked with meteorological and astronomical arcana, including the phases of the moon. We checked it frequently for practical reasons but also to enjoy the odd bits of information the hosts posted, including “waxing gibbous.” These pleasant memories came back while I was reading Andrew Frisardi’s “Gibbous” (The Harvest and the Lamp, 2020):

 

“The moon at times is hunched and old,

Deformed, a decadent yellow,

A jealous seed of sun gone cold,

A decrepit has-been fellow.

 

“He’s leering at the summer night,

Rising in a sea of sweat

Above the hill town’s wavering light,

Timid, heavy, pocked, and wet.”

 

It’s an unlikely word that echoes the names of the primate and the historian, and is drawn from the Latin gibbus meaning “hump” – thus, Frisardi’s “hunched and old.” One of the meanings given by the OED is “hunch-backed; having a hump.” In lunar terms, the dictionary gives “said of the moon or a planet when the illuminated portion exceeds a semicircle, but is less than a circle.” The most general definition: “convex, rounded, protuberant.” Dr. Johnson’s variation in his Dictionary is finicky and charming: “convex; protuberant; swelling into inequalities.”