Luna

You came to see me tonight, and I almost missed you but for an open window.

The weather had turned, an unexpected but delightful turn into spring after a long, gray spate of winter.  Windows were opened, shorts were donned in celebration.  Except for the wind, the night was unusually quiet.  I revel in it, when the world seems to draw in its breath.  The din and clatter of the modern world is a shroud I gladly discard when the opportunity is right.  Especially on nights of the full moon.

I read somewhere long ago, that seawater and human blood contain  similar proportions of salts, and the moon is master of the tides.  The full moon rises and the oceans respond, mastered by forces unseen.  That explains it, then:  you, the Luna to my Mari.  

A cool room, an open window, maybe the faintest murmur of distant music...the stage was set for a visitation.  These things are, after all, pillars of my memory.  Thick trunks reaching for the sky.  Perhaps I should name them 'Trees of Heaven', although with a decidedly more appealing aroma than the infamous trees of China, that bear the same name.

Forgive me, I ramble.  Listen to me blathering on...it was moments like that bound me to you, those times where I channeled a pedant or docent and you would take me by the ears, hands on my cheeks and kiss me to silence.  Nowadays, I have no willing lips to close mine.

I ramble in hermetic silence, with only echoes to console me.  A mad monk pacing his cell and reciting the genus and species of every flower and herb he ever grew in the apothecary's garden, with bees as his witness.  Ah, if only I had the genius of Mendel or Augustine, perhaps then I could make sense of this desolation.

Another transgression, a digression, again I must ask forgiveness.  It was the moon, you see, that did this.  The blinds were up when I stepped into the room, and there you were, refulgent in argentine beauty spilling over the carpet and onto the bed.  The breeze through the screen was cool without edge.  The branches of the sycamore tree were etched in a color darker than black, in the backlight of the moon, reminding me of your hair laying across linen in the candlelight.  I closed my eyes.  Luna held silent counsel in a few degrees of arc across the sky.  I shivered.

The silver bars between the shadows latticed across the bed, but I was not yet ready to leave the cell in which they held me, and you.

This time, I did not weep.