Moon Knows

Moon knows what lies beyond the end of her beam: a brass kaleidoscope of trinkets and tuk-tuks, neon teddies and troubadours, paper and pencils. Somewhere there is a pestle and mortar grinding blood from wolf or wolf from boy. Nothing is as it seems as it twists over and over in geometry’s repetitive bite.

In a small town outside Seville a boy sits at an old fashioned school desk, its lid scarred with the dreams and desires of the classmates gone before him. Next to the black hole an ink blot of the virgin and the holy ghost watch him constantly. Truancy is not an option. Open on the desk lies ‘Materia Gramatica’ and he stares as hard as he can through conjugations and consternation in a desire to conjure the images in the leather-bound photograph album that lies an inch below wood, incarcerated, entombed within the coffin of the desk.

The teacher comes in, his spectacles two moons. He will settle for nothing but blood. He is Master of the strap. The boy sees the words melt on the page, feels his nails bite into his palms. It is the photographs that have landed him in this predicament yet still he loves them. How can he not? The photographs hold happiness in stasis. The happiness of lives already run, already lost. Children who he had only known as old men and women or not at all and yet there they were, children just like him. He was their incarnation, a seed of generations past. They too had sat in this school room. Had they sat at this desk? Been watched over by the Virgin. Had one of them conceived the holy ghost. Was Moonface there then too? Moon knows.

Sailing Away

Taste the air, touch the sky. Could it be magic Cressida, this portal to another life? 

The chalice body holds grief but I would fill it with the milk and honey of a new land and return renewed, resurrected. 

I sang the pirates gospel for a time. It was a long song and the rhythm carried me far from myself into storms and tempests, across currents of green and white foam. It was a song of surrender so simple even the ship’s cat could join in but when the carousing died away I was spelled into nothingness: caught in a cavity between latitude and longitude. All that was left was the swell of the sea, no point on the horizon to steer by.

It was not my song. 

I thirst for a visceral communion of my own Cressida, rather than being tangled up in blue. Give me the crimson heat of colour and the saffron fire of the sun. Give me the green of the earth not the gold of the casket: I have no need of the pirate hoard. I need to find the frequency that resonates within me: my mind, my chalice. 

What holds us together? Chalice body holds us together. One tree many leaves.

All in a day's work

Can the curtain fall gold? The Midas touch of morning light. Let it make you happy. Watch the play unfold. Bread sellers, shoe sellers, three on a white trike laden with herbs, a tide of scooters urging the onion seller on, while the garlic seller turns catherine wheels down the street in an attempt to escape his own smell. 

The musicians are out and the jugglers too. Their clothes are torn and patched but their smiles are wide and their hearts are warm. How you bring out the light in us.
Tumblers come to defy gravity. I hold their hat while they show how its done, pass it round for spare coins. No! Give someone else the key I don’t want the responsibility. Look how they tumble in Prussian blue and gold and shake off the rust of the day, clearing a path of filtered light. 

Afternoon comes and shadows lengthen. A conference of elephants break off their debate. They stand and sway to an unseen band, their trunks like pendulums. They are watching a knot of women hold up sheets, fold folding folded: an ivory origami. It is an intricate dance of mothers and daughters, corner to corner, centre and back. Who has the right, the chicken or the egg? Elephants nod respectfully at the interplay of generations.

And the glint of light glosses sharp edges smooth as the curtain of day falls. White turns to gold, to Prussian blue, then seeps into the cracks of the earth to wait for resurrection.