Lunar Communion

Mine, Thine, Yours and Ours

High moon this morning at 3 a.m., leaking past full, one night past the blare which burnt all noctal surfaces with unforgettable gleam. It makes me think of other full moons, from all lunar seasons. To wit, this one:

MOONLIGHT

Enter with me
the archways
of this moon

A glittering path
over the sea
we darken to

The blue white
sheets on which
we curve and curl
like waves

The round milk
of your flesh in
my grateful
greedy hands

My white length
hard and deep
in you plunging
shining wet and
proud and urgent

The pearls of
white fire I
plant in you
and the white
and green welcome
which rises
when you tense
and sigh:

This pale boat
we drift down
the night wrapped
together,
dissolved in
each other

Join with
me in this
seam of silver
just beyond
all words
pulling us
so gently
and permanently
beyond
what we know
of love

Each day covers
the tracks of
this trail
But we will
find it again
when the moon
opens its fragrant
arch over
our welcome,
our surrender,
this dream.


Would you steal that blue fire from me? To spark what engines? I post pseudonymnotically, so this is so much spilled coin for You to scoop and hoard or spend as You please. Most of the traffic to my poetry blogs has come by way of x-rated searches. (The most hits to Immrama, I think,come from searches for "glory hole," a phrase that turned up in my verse recollection of a wild Memorial Day weekend in 1982.) .

Who am I talking to, anyway? Most of this is mediated or meditative prayer; conversations with dead writers, my Beloved, my God. What I make of this mess is Mine; or Thine with My difference. Meaning the material is archetypal, but the garden I grow from it is fertilized by a huge amount of personal experience and articulation. it. "A primordial image is evidently determined as to its contents only when it is conscious," write Jung, "hence filled out with the material of conscious experience." (from "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype").So the gods carouse with present-day faces.

That I share that conversation here is based on a hunch that it is also part of Your prayer, Dear Reader, part of your symposia with moons and seas and skies. What you do with this stuff, ferried or derricked from depths which we all share, is Your business. a business which, of course, in the big picture, is Ours. So the circle completes itself, old voices I hear which speak with my voice which goes out and comes back in voices which sound like my own and God's.

But what do I know, how do I say it with any certainty, when I have no trust in the knowledge I already possess? It's what I don't know that I pine for, or knowledge I have that I cannot speak with any dayside certainty. This is what I mean:


I KNOW

David St. John

The definition of beauty is easy;
it is what leads to desperation.
-Valery


I know the moon is troubling.

Its pale eloquence is always such a meddling,
Intrusive lie. I know the pearl sheen of the sheets
Remains the screen I'll draw back against the night;

I know all of these silences invented for me approximate
Those real silences I cannot lose to daylight ...
I know the orchid smell of your skin

The way I know the blackened path to the marina,
When gathering clouds obscure the summer moon --
Just as I know the chambered heart where I begin.

I know the lacquered jewel box, its obsidian,
The sexual trumpeting of the diving, sweeping loons ...
I know the slow combinations of the night, & the glow

Of fireflies, deepening the shadows of all I do not know.


from Merlin: New Poems

Maybe the question of what sort of knowledge I'm talking about has to do with the difference between archetype and stereotype. Symbols that get fixed to any one meaning freeze, ossify, petrify. They become blocks to growth rather than gradients. Institutionalized symbols become religions, safe structures in which a limited range of human existence can flourish. Stereotypical regimes are old and defensive, at war with the vital barbarians at the gate.

Their success is always our demise. The gnostic, revolutionary Christ was excised in large part from the Scriptures, morphing into that softglow bearded guy who loves the little children and blesses the cheesemakers.. The sword in his words was sheathed. As flag rather than firebrand, the Cross cannot show the way into the changing and perplex dark of Self which the age of the Fish was supposed to inititate.

For a symbol to live, it has to stand the test of daily apotheosis. Symbols which I have adopted as my own -- well, wave-rider, blue horizons sweet and wild -- must augment rather than dispel the day's storms. A bigger God requires a larger heart, and a growing symbol is the best -- and perhaps the only -- way to connect the two.

Heaven knows, modernity's a bitch. Free artistry of the self seems to be the litany, but it's just so damn easy to fall off the road every which way. Pluralities of meaning, complicate amassing harmonies, polyrhythmic motions, who ya gonna call? Far safer to adopt the stereotype of fundamentalism, with its certainties and shaking finger pointed at the devil's perplex details.

But how to proceed without sure definition? Without a ritual structure, a sacred container, a myth, the peramble becomes a constant oopsing through a Swiss-cheese-shaped terrain of lacunae and abysms..

Ergo the symbol. Anne Carson in "Eros the Bittersweet" notes that originally the symbol was a "symbolon," one half of a knucklebone. The other, missing half was the invisible, unspeakable meaning. So a symbol joints self and Self, I and Thou, humankind and its animal/divine orders.

And if our language for meaning keeps evolving, then the symbols must necessarily move on, too. In their history they suffer anathemata: they invert, revert, subvert and convert. Cross of the abbey-builder becomes burning cross of those who fear change; breasts are sweet and gall-filled; the phallus fructifier then fool's flopper then phallocism's phuckwonger then firebrand of the Phalangiist then nib of the fibber who lies to say all. Round and round it must go, and where it stops we must never know.

Though that way is perilous (uncertain, perplex, meandering, obfuscate, prone to error, foolery, weakness, hot flashes and cold boners), I think the greater danger is to try to fix lucent symbols which to dayside certainties, to think too rigidly of them with our logical and rhetorical minds. It's always wise to plant by the moon, and grow under the sun; I say let the symbols remain dark, like roots, and tend whatever grows from that dark.

Back to the symbolon: what is the other half of the knucklebone I here revere? A blue eyed mute virgin weaving days at the bottom of the sea? A shore beyond all shores? The God who reads this whether you ever do or not?

MOONWHALE

The tide in which you welcomed me
and spilt my heavens with a sigh
was greater still when it ebbed out,
leaving me upon a beach more wounded
than I knew wounds could go.
The hurt was like that Pacific breech
which delved the moon ages ago
to cross our nights in sky tidals
as love's cold luminary, singing
whale-like in its coracle of basaltic,
borrowed bone. That wild wounding
woke every pulse of God and verse
that swims so hard in me today
as I sit in my great white writing chair
astride the darkling, well-spouting
whale of that old wound. Loss is
the bittersweetmost fruit
to ripen in love's orchard, it's fall
and split of raw red heart revealing
fruit I never dreamed to feel so
sea-widely, so deeply beneath
the merry blue. In those months
after you left me once again
I walked and drove so slowly,
taking in ripe autumn days
& amazed at their perfections,
my grief gilding the hours
with a melancholy booze,
each oak and dog and child
God's supernumerary coin,
spilled from a purse which
swelled great and greater
every day you walked yet
further away. It was not your
kiss but the abyss it left behind
that hauled this boat from shore
to sail a thousand moony nights
in search of ampler calyx, for
that nippled swoon which could
milked the dregs of that cathedral
room I found beneath the marges
of desire. Its sea-deep ache burns
yet today, incessant as the moon.
A wild chatter of angelic teeth
inside the falling, tidal croon.