A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Read Online Free PDF

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