moon that carries water
unrequited love, celestial sorrow and recovering cosmic wholeness
…I had long sensed we were broken….A dream had nudged me toward repair….Trust is an inkling caterpillar. We could long for each other through a whole lifetime and still never meet long enough with our courage to stretch in the direction of love….A spider in my dream, a swollen bite on the back of my calf. You asked what I sensed they were weaving. I told you we were the woven, and the weaving….
We meet chest deep in an ocean cove off shore of an evergreen wooded, mossy place, of crags descending into water of gray granite speckled with mica, kelp bobbing around us like umbilical cords. We have traveled a long ways to arrive here, a place we have not seen for some thousands of years.
You bathe naked and my eyes are nightshade, drawn into the glistening of water, familiar with the midnight sun. Will you always break me open with incantation? Will I only ever write poems for the ones who hold their wombs with dignity, enduring scarification, listening for dawn? Will you always wail your gratitude? Will it always draw blood from my eyes?
The longing I felt for you was always for this moment: this moment at the end of time or the end of water after water, with someone singing of god in an island language of distant ancestors, with the house empty, full of spirits.
I wrote of us once as lizards, losing one another across every continent, love expanding to span an ocean. Do you remember? Because I do:
Before time, we were lizards in the sun. I remember my body was a long organ thumping for our lives. I could not feel the distinction between our skins, leathery wrinkled callus draping our spirits, a living suit alight with sensation. We groomed one another for an entire lifetime. You and me, the distinction irrelevant, us, we, one body stroking itself, preening itself, eyes closed, chin toward the warmth that moved our blood. The sun too was an extension of our bodies, as without it our blood clotted, cold. And so we never wanted for love. For the sun was not a distant concept but an intimate bodily function, the very warmth that animated us, the same warmth we felt in between our two bodies and that feeling between in fact making us one, erasing any illusion of betweenness. At night we would curl into a single spiral and hold the mini sun we had inherited from the big sun throughout the day between our two bodies and become ourselves a great luminous body, a star upon earth to be witnessed by all other stars and all other bodies on other sleeping planets. We had nothing to fear. Flies sacrificed themselves upon our acidic tongues and we gave thanks for them and they gave life to our bellies and our way of life was nurtured.
Then, the earth began to shift. Underneath the stone that seemed it would hold us forever, god ached for change like how a child’s gums cast out its tiny teeth. Our stone split in two and my claws which seemed borne to caress you began to grasp and clamber after your departing body. But it had been decided. You would go away from me, and I would grasp at the memory of you for millennia. Still, it was that very grasping that would urge us forward on our evolutionary path. for it was our destiny to grieve our closeness for all of time, but also to peer into the folds of that grief to discover the reality of what can never be taken from us, the discovery that our souls came here to be forever transformed by, and in turn, elevate the consciousness of the entire cosmos.
Your love continues to humble me and awaken me. Your generosity with your own pain continues to stretch me wide. I am holding you again, your flesh soft and warm. Your body is alive and mine is seasoned, smoothed down like river stones that have endured a fire. I come to you with the safety of my calm, that is the survivance of many storms, that is the knowing I will survive again. I bring this strength to you in the outstretched palm of my hand, this is what I have to offer you. This time, I do not offer to save your life. This time, I meet you in my broken, I meet you in my whole.
Someone in me remembers this place, and has chosen this cove to lay my placenta down. There is anxiety among my kin and comrades. We are still connected to that first earth we incarnated through, that the doctors handed to nurses who placed in plastic and threw down a chute to await incineration. We wonder if we can ever recover that part of us that turned to ash. But nothing on this earth truly vanishes, for this universe is one great continuous chamber out of which there is no exit, no entry. We have always lived here and we always will.
This is how we gather ourselves again, through collecting the scattered dust and ash of what our ancestors knew to keep contained, wrapped in silk, embalmed in box that mother keeps with her precious things, social security cards and stash of money, where things are kept that she can grab quickly and thoughtlessly in case of disaster, and the stub of the umbilical cord is among them, something not to be forgotten, something never to be left behind. It contains the imprint of what we must remember, in a matrix of forgetfulness. It tells us something of our destiny–that in our moments of greatest lostness, wandering the halls of this crosshatched earth, preferring to disappear into a dark ditch in the soil and never return than to choose between such a narrow offering of options for our lives, we can return to this piece of material, formed at the meeting of flesh and spirit, formed in collaboration between mother’s earthly womb and spirit’s cosmic origins, together sewing a nest for landing, a place where celestial information and planetary nutrients come together to nurture the growth of a human body that will live out a universal purpose.
I consider, what is the state of a world in which this piece of material is disposed of, rather than regarded as sacred, important, a map of who we are, a map to how we become? And then I look around me and take in the evidence of that world— it’s the one that raised me, and so much of the confusion and glumness I experience is not mine to claim but a reflection of a world forged in deprivation of ritual meant to remind us of why we are here and how to live.
We have been given another chance– for us, there are so many chances. Our creator is not punishing. Our creator is not coddling. Our creator moves always in the direction of continuation. We dream of holding our placentas and they appear in our hands, in glass boxes, jiggling like jellyfish, clear as ether, sparkling with stars. We place them in the water and the ocean lights up, streams of lightning. Sky is sea and sea is sky, we may be flying or swimming, our bodies know how, at home in air, home in ocean, bridge beings with wings or gills, sewing heaven and earth with our diving and twirling, we soar between, and there is no between, no here and there, there is only all at once, here and now, and we are home.
The stone will always hold us, the water will always sing our pain. The stone will always grind us to dust, the water will always forget us. The water will never forget us. How can I explain? When I leaked stars from my eyes, I survived only because the river swallowed me whole. When the river rose up to drink stars from my eyes, the water never paused to consider. The water gathers her own.
