Moon Look Down

Moon Look Down
On this sparkling night,
graced by the shimmering light
of white feather dust falling through shifting leaves,
let me weave you a dark composure of words
to celebrate our Lady Wonder,
the velvet queen of dreams and shadows,
the breastless and shallow-breathing virgin,
the cauldron of completeness at the end of the rainbow.
You cannot hold her, she is night itself -
galloping across the heavens;
braying ancient counterpoint;
seeding the sky with metaphors
and casting pale shadows down blinded alleys.
She is the keeper of ecstasies.
She is the blindness of the newborn.
She is the secret meetings of unplanned misfortunes.
She is the gatekeeper at the finish line,
with Love and Death on either side.
Can you feel her now, passing?
Button up your coats . . .
Bury your toes in your boots . . .
That cold that leaks into you is her cold.
The darkness that envelops you is her darkness.
The sounds of the wind playing the forest are her sounds.
In the cold, clammy, inelegant tidal pools of our being,
the motion of waves never stops,
the pounding of cycles never ceases.
Music discovered in such harmonies
surprises itself with unforeseen synergies.
And yet -
We have forgotten her, the lady of the night . . .
Where poets once dreamed of eternal love,
now we hunger just for presence;
Where writers once told of epic truths,
barren suburbs and inelegant subteens parade;
Where painters once wove the colors and textures of magic,
committee meetings and spectacle preside;
Where actors once stood firm and tall,
people huddle together around take-out counters.
We have locked out the wild and the magical;
We have scaled things down to our scale;
We have come to believe only in our own beliefs;
We have lost our friends and do not recognize our enemies.
Shhh! Let her speak.
Listen! She speaks under the base-notes of our consciousness:
"Take me inside you;
Dare to hold me;
Flow me through your bones;
Feel the thunder in my silence . . ."
A good thing must have something bad in it, the Indians say.
For to have a thing worth having,
it should be extreme enough of itself to touch its opposite.
Let me speak for her then, if she pleases:
I say,
To hell with happiness, I want ecstasy!
I want the violent desire of body-talk and perpetual motion.
I want the endlessness of unimagined time.
I want the straining at the bit,
the battlefield of energies,
the racing into birth,
the love of eternal opposites,
the fire of frenzy,
the drunkenness that spares nothing,
the peace that passes understanding.
For we are running in a fair race with no racetrack
but the nite, and no competition but the dawn, Bob Dylan said.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of
the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows
are the songs and the silences of the night, Kahlil Gibran observed.
I have spent eighty years trying to discover what was behind
water and all that time I was in it. I have now passed through it,
and in the end I have come out to the place
where the horses run..., Carl Jung admitted, acknowledging God.
Writers, your challenge, should you accept it:
to walk through life simple and unadorned
and feel the energies of the wind and waves beneath your feet,
the tendrils of change winding through your hair,
the shriek of the lost and unprotected in each of us;
to be constantly aware of the eternal,
and also of the shifting sands which inhabit it,
to approach wildness and call its name,
and to never approach wildness without fear and respect.
To push people to be aware of their own power and depth,
no matter how forcefully they choose to fight or ignore it.
To walk through haunted streets, singing and dancing your pain.
To mix the ancient with the modern, and bring them both home.
To tear holes in the seams of time, and let the vampires loose.
To create sanctuaries and inhabit them.
Listen, she is calling you . . .