A Love Letter from a Stray Moon (4 page)

We, gleaners of time, pick up the unharvested moments.
NOW!
And he seized a scrap of pure serendipity—a charred piece of newspaper in the courtyard which contains only that one word
now!
On the now of midsummer's day, we lay in a hazy fusion of all our Junes, the day the guests didn't show up but, oh, Walt Whitman did. I lay next to him, my womb so moist, so warm, so kindly dark that I thought any gardener would want to plant bulbs in it. Diego did not, and his reluctance bewildered me.

Sometimes we drank our way to insatiable childhood. Glee in me and pondjumping, boisterous with love for him, I careered around noisily as a seven-year-old on a tricycle playing a tin drum. He made me snort with laughter when he picked up six pebbles, saying they were in search of some earwax. Suntanned and lying on my back on the grass, knees muddy and socks crumpled, me giggleful and naughty. I am a boy. All boys are brothers, and how I love my brothers. I am seven, seventeen and forty-seven, and he loves all my ages as I love all his.

Garrulous, hungry for food and women, tubby, he slept in the bathtub and I loved to bathe him, to put toys in the water, to use sponges and flannels and rosewater and orange, and him so smallboyish until his fountain-flower decided to play too. Another time, sharing a bath, we sat sideways, watching miniature rally cars, cakes and small animals rocket past on the racetrack of the bathmat and he, aged five and a half, lay under a stripy towel in a DIY sauna, while he, aged forty-five and a half or sixty-five and a half, cried serious tears which broke through his face, rock them in though he did. ‘Why can't we
really live
? Do we lack the courage for it? I want to really live.' So do I, my love, and I watch over him as if he was the child I had not had.

He despised the merely managing, subsistence farming of the soul because he demanded to live by the electric passion, to let his body turn tidal, not walking pick-peck-pick on the mealy-mouthed pavement. I too demanded to really live, and we lived out our feral passion like teenagers; going to the market one day he threw me backwards and laughing across the stalls and nearly fucked me in full view of all the gawping shoppers. You want to love me? Do so. Quick now. Slip your strong keen up under my long red, feel my warm wet. And then come my gasp. But I wanted to live all my ages, not only as a teenager but as a mother and a grandmother. My friends said he was selfish and cruel, being so unwilling to have a child with me, but fatherhood was not his forte. He fathered his art. And my child was him.

But do not think I serenely accept this. Do not ever call me tranquil. You can keep your moonlight sonatas—I don't recognise myself in them. I can't take this kind of solitude any more. To be wholly immaterial is too lonely. Must I stay forever so fucking ethereal? Why can't I matter, materially? Why can't I be beflowered? Why can't I spend a few years making cakes and splashing? Why can't I be a fucking lovely ordinary lovely fucking woman? I want to slope off to a bar, warm my hands by the stove, I want to be sleepy with wine, my head on his soft shoulder, as round as a baby's, and I have a sweet, swollen, musky kind of longing to kindle my own kitten. Any scraggy farm cat is allowed her litter of kittens, but not me; I am a stray moon at the back door, mewing for a crescent kitten. The door is slammed against me. ‘It's only the moon. Should be fucking neutered.'

All women wanted to mother him. (And fuck him.) Peter Pan, I called him, because I knew him as both child and age-old Pan, goat-god, satyr, erotic to the hilt, genius of the groves, god of the groins, wickedness in the wink. Lascivious as Jean Genet but still as lucent and innocent as the sleeping Endymion, the man given eternal youth because the moon was his lover and came down nightly to embrace him as he slept on the mountain. And the moon bore him daughters.

We only saw each other truly, nakedly, at night, in the darknesses of space and in the little unlinked hours, uncounted, unaccounted by anyone but us, the dark jewels. An elfin love, a faerie love, magically true, actually unreal, but rawly corporeal as the memory of his cock in me sent flutters through the muscles of my cunt for days afterwards.

The first of these jewels was a midnight hour. He had asked about my mind and I had answered about my cunt. How not, if I was to answer him truthfully? You speak in blood and silver, he said. If we drink from the same red cut-glass cup, his lips touching the red glass and the red blood, then we (‘Drink to me only with thine eyes') share a passion and a feral mystery. (‘Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I'll not look for wine.') Let's face it, most people don't do things like that. I was mad, and I had the true lunatic's lunar alibi. How the full moon shone that night.

I was born in tidalism, as the earth was changing from liquid to solid, one huge tide of swirling swept off the earth and coalesced as moon. Being tidal myself, I willed his tides to their fullness and I surged over his flood defences, breaching his sea walls so he could not keep me out. I was his madness and his magic and his muse, I was his devotion and his devastation and his devouring passion. I could walk through walls, swim through them, so no air or water or brick could stop me, and when his soul was lost I could find it, curl up next to it and sleep in its arms.

I was an inverse thief in the night: I stole nothing from anyone but I stole into everything, I gave myself away, shedding myself till I waned to nothing, a blank edge of darkness. I stole in through his eyes to his thoughts and I crept in through windows, or through the sky, stealing into his body, an extra ever-undiscovered mineral in the nature of my light, so my quicksilver slipped into his head, and the mad hatter was moon-maddened. Draw down the moon till the tropics are glades of liquid silver and know that the moon has a wingspan the size of the world while the wingtips of madness brush the wind whose own madness in turn stretches the wings tauter. So a gale-force wind and an angle of feather reach further for another wing-inch of turbulence till, at the point of maximum tension, the hurtling bird is almost torn apart by the force of the storm. Almost.

I was as naked as the moon to him. I was, in fact, inside out. Raw, willingly so, shivering with exposure, my cunt was open to his gaze and my heart open. In one nightmare, I shouted to him for help and all that real day my real throat was hoarse from the shout, my real mind reeling with need for him, for even the moon can be frightened by stalking starshadows which flicker in her nightmares.

I have gazed at his face for thousands of years, his windward, fireward, forward, pathward face, a mountain face I have explored and watched, and behind the snowy boulders I have seen the deepest and softest and rarest thing—the blue eyes of a snow leopard gazing back.

For him, all the world became eager. The pip would willingly sprout, the fish would dance which had only swum before, the rain would jump which had only fallen before. Tender to all aspiration, he lent the saplings a hand. His mindlight flooded the world like a director with whom every actor is in love and women couldn't help but respond which I understand because the
world
couldn't help but respond: the tiniest spider ran arpeggios for him, the Nile burst its banks, the Amazon forest went on the razzle for him, the bee sucked harder for nectar when he cherished its diligence. Midnight never knew herself till him, but then she dressed in deep-blue velvet and shared a tequila or three, all for his sweet charisma, his charm, for he was the quickener of what was inheld. He saw meaning in all things and so made the world matter in mindedness. Before him, any old dawn would do. He appeared and sunrise increased the voltage because of the unique warmth of his gaze and the dawn chorus turned up the volume because of the quality of his listening. The rainbow began life with just two colours, red and violet, but seeing the wash of pleasure in his eyes it flung in five more, and then the countless shades between. The mountain robin never knew quite who it sang for till he watched as it fluffed up its breast feathers for the best-ever robin boast and he, of course, spoke fluent robin, so he understood it perfectly, and as his face was creased with kindness, lined with story, and crumpled with love, I wanted to make my nest with him, I wanted my belly plump with a swelling egg. I never understood why he was so reluctant.

I was there at his beginning. If I did not exist, the life of mankind would have been only mundane, lovely but ordinary. He could build his hut, collect his water and pick his fruit, a creature of the day only, and happily so but a little lacklustre. I never took away his dayness but I flooded him with an insight of shadows, a feral lustre, that light not of the mind's eye but of the mind's loins. Wild licence. I can affect the lives of mussels and the pull of tides, but no mind knew I did that until him. Wonder riddles our love. No wonder I loved him: his wondering mind was the first mind on earth to know the iridescence of my wonderlight.

Metaphor began because he loved me—and I am the first metaphor. He was charged with it, swollen with it, metaphor forced its way out of him, a spurt of seed, each glittering and dancing, minute and yet magnificent, the pip invisible and invincible, microcosmic yet containing new worlds a thousand times over, each seed a seed-syllable of speech, lighting the air with a cascade of starlight which fizzes on my tongue. All is metaphor—I am the moon, but I am not the moon. He is Diego, but much more truly he is all of mankind. I am one woman, but I am every woman who understands loss. I am Frida and I am not Frida. We are both fractals, shapes which can be divided into countless self-similar shapes, because all human hearts are fractal like this. True and yet just a metaphor in a world of metaphors. Metaphor is itself a metaphor, a carrying-across as a child would carry a star in his cupped hands across a room to show his father. ‘Look, Papa, look how I made a star and when can we go to the moon?'

He was a child of starlight, child of no one: I was the mother of no one so I elect my children. There are always substitutions, elliptical ways by which the psyche survives and so
he
was the child I carried, cupped in the moon's womb. If I had a child, it was him, sweetest, moon-struck child, let me carry him for months inside me. In our difficult dream, I am the moon, mother of gods, mother of Diego, in all his incarnations, mother of humanity. That's how it is in Mexican mythology, and the sun is the fertiliser, but this was the role he refused, so the sun became my son, my child. I wanted to give birth to him; he was the big pale baby lying in my lap. His fat-man breasts were like the chubby breasts of a baby and I nuzzled my nose into his armpit to smell him like a tigress sniffs her cub.

In moonlight and in metaphorlight, all things are translated, carried across. A star is a seed is a child is a syllable, and he, shapeshifter, is them all, metamorphosing—moving from one form to another. But he was not the first metamorphosis. I was. He was the first to see it. From metaphor he took wing and made myth, magic, mystery and mindedness, art and abstraction and paradox. (I am cold but I make passions burn, I am white but I make red blood flow. I am parched but all the wetness of all the oceans on earth see-saw for me.) A seed, a star, a syllable, a child. They are all the same. All potential. All needing what I can give them, what I am: Time. I am ever unripe, I never flower but I produce ripeness, bloom and burgeoning. I am the original entelechy.

My light was the melody of time and my changes were time's rhythm. His first abstraction was time and he could only have known it through me. I gave him a calendar of changes: a possible future, a realised past, a present of pure potential. I am never the same, so he looks for me every evening and every evening I have turned again, but never turned away from him. Except once.

It was around me and about me that he first whispered his shamanic realities. I drew mystery in the sky for him and he drew me magic on earth, meeting me every month in the language of fire and mind. Because I seemed inexplicable he needed myths to explain me and so for my sake he stepped into the magic of his role. He alone would be self-aware in my light because I gave him the night and he understood the invisible world because of me. Myths glimmered in the dark, will o' the wisps across the marches of the mind flickering
am I real?
Never so.
Am I
true?
Always.

And I stretched out my arms and glided into purity utterly translated as he stroked my white body on a bed of white sheets and white sheepskin. He planted the flowers of innocence and those flowers flew, for in those days all flight was innocent, and afterwards, in a lassitude of limbs after flight, he folded me into sleep, tucked the sheets round me, spread his wingspan of swans across me and under the shadow of his wings I slept and dreamt of flying. I have seen his wings, those plump, white wings. I can never forget that, my angel.

He saw how weary I was of exile. He saw how I cried to come home, to come in from the cold night. He saw my oddest, longest, most elliptical loneliness. He saw I had friends and lovers but that I ached for the fireside, for the
lares
and
penates
. He saw I could be all the more free if I had a home, how my hard dance might become more beautiful if I had the grace of a chance to balance on one lovely corner of land, so he folded me into his home.

If a piece of the moon fell into someone's lap, what would they do? Most people would put it back. Not out of unkindness but just not really knowing what to do with it. The moon's quite a handful, a bit of a challenge, a high-maintenance girlfriend, who goes wonky every month, plays havoc without meaning to, she is a force of chaos which messes up order. But he, with a piece of the moon fallen into his lap, gazed at it for a few weeks, then tenderly tucked it into his softest pocket saying: I think it will be better off there. Most men wouldn't make a home with moonlight: too much blood and silver. He gave me love and home, those two things for which I starved. I came home to his
lares
and
penates
, the pre-Columbian statues, and he came home to mine. I found a one-word poem by the fireside. It said ‘hearth'. So I wrote it out in orange, all that a hearth contains. Heat. Art. Eat. Hear. Earth. Heart. What more? Hart. My soul longs for you as the hart yearns for the stream, the psalm says. He left me longing, and this is my
Desideratum
. I am half-Catholic, after all, and the mother of sorrows has moved into the attic of my mind.