Mysteries of Bliss VIII: Imago

Whose image so filled the night
which opened through that door
with the quintessence of blue phosphor,
a wild lucency that lit my way
between mother Leto rising
from the sea and that shore-bitch
Hekat, yowling for blood seed?
My fragrant hope of finding love
placed her in a blue klieg light
only I could see, washing over
her hair and face and turning
her curves to water as she
drank demurely in some
preterit bar, waiting, I
was sure, for something she
would not know until she
saw me smile. But that was just
the motive fiction which
sprung me from my damaged lair,
hurrying out onto the bruised
avenues of night to blow it all
again with the rest of my
pickled ilk, down the vast
brine barrel of desire’s
lonely, self-evicting swash.
Truth is, the scene I so desperately
sought each night like a grail
was not called by any door
outside my own but
rather hollered out from within,
by mysteries I couldn’t
name and thus were prey to,
ens and djinns and kelpies,
diabolic banshees of the moon
lavish in silkily curved descents,
bursting, I was sure, with fresh-
milked news of the man I could
not be since I was holding on
to his boy so stubbornly.
Lustral, mistral, widwife, muse:
all were frescoes in the
grand chapel where I sought
my wife for life, at least for
one night. All these distaffs
washed across a face slowly
bulbed on inside my mind
as I dully practiced my guitar,
growing more lucent and surgent
with each can of beer I drained,
amping me with lunar ardor.
I was convinced that somewhere
out there, on some random night,
I’d find the one who could open
with a kiss that locked-
down, bruited arbor, and make all
days green and wild again. It was
my hope of finding my way back to
Eden on a bed delved from its
lost depths that shaped and
fraught that night-turning door
with such hymeneal craft and sass
that in just Heading Out
I was already entering her,
naked of all broken means. Surely
she would see it in my eyes
when I walked up and said hello,
offering to buy her a drink: surrender
to the ocean which composed
her curves in waves I was ready
to be baptized in, her son and
lover both, votive, feral, truest
where i could only stand there
staring wide and open in her eyes,
like a book fished from the depths
which told her tale complete ---
Foolish stuff, what does any of
this have to do with who that
woman was, what did I care of
the big question which had hauled
her out to that bar that very night?
Foolish too to ply even imagined
hope in the worst strata of all,
that zeroed night of drunks on
fire. Yes and Yes, it was such
stupid stuff: I’m just trying to
write here of the nature of
that light which flickered in
my mind to lamp a woman
far out in blicker’s night:
Frail and wrong-headed though
it was, that image was the
first flicker of a candle
which burns so brightly here,
solstitial against all dark.
Heavy fog and drippy rain
outside this morning, Gulf-
saturate, not chill, just boggy,
shrouded, so dense that sounds
are cloistered, muted, close.
My wife stayed over at her
sister’s last night, weary from
fruitless Christmas shopping
and heavy traffic, not wanting
to make the long drive home
in such dreary dark rain.
Yet her presence is in every
room outside and in, a meld of
the real and imagined woman,
the hopeful and the hopeless
one, the passionate yet cold
one who wishes I were more
of her kind of man as much
as I wish she were more of
the woman who ghosts the
door I passed on through
til I got here at last, with
the woman whose stars got
strayed in mine. Got up at
3:15 to read and write and
will head back to bed soon,
perchance to float off to
that Avalon I never could
remain on more than a night
yet call my home, like the
moon which marrows in
my bones. I still believe
in that fruitful shore which
crashes love’s blue bliss
and draws forever back, leaving me
anointed and in love with its evanescence,
the lucence of a life-long-faded kiss.