A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Read Online Free Page A

I will sleep under it like a mohair blanket. Weave me a spellbound home and I will nest in it like a bird in its own spring. Throw me madness like dice, you clown, and I will wear my knickers on my head like a tea cosy isn’t and use a biscuit for every other simile. Come to me cockhard and stun me with desire and I will outglow the embers for days. Kiss my lips as we part as they do parting joy from sorrow ( alegría, miserere ), and I will take the descant part on an old school recorder and play my way to heaven.
    My passion electrifies the domestic and that is why, when he leaves, the candles gutter, the fire goes grey, the cats keen for him, and the flowers huddle chilly in the vase, when he leaves, when he leaves. How many times did he leave me before he left me?
    To take his hand I would have to measure every inch in miles, but to take his mind there is no distance—all these moon miles between us are thinner than a leaf skeleton. He touches me more than I can say, floating his poems in the waters of my soul, lying circled wet and lovely in his dreams and, as I sway the tides without touching them, so I became influent in him. I cannot touch him now but I trickled into his veins and melted into his mind so I became his delicate intricate, his inner intimate, his co-inspirator. Am I still? I don’t know. But I know that he is both the silk of my tears and the reason for them.
    We, gleaners of time, pick up the unharvested moments. NOW! And he seized a scrap of pure serendipity—a charred piece of newspaper in the courtyard which contains only that one word now! On the now of midsummer’s day, we lay in a hazy fusion of all our Junes, the day the guests didn’t show up but, oh, Walt Whitman did. I lay next to him, my womb so moist, so warm, so kindly dark that I thought any gardener would want to plant bulbs in it. Diego did not, and his reluctance bewildered me.
    Sometimes we drank our way to insatiable childhood. Glee in me and pondjumping, boisterous with love for him, I careered around noisily as a seven-year-old on a tricycle playing a tin drum. He made me snort with laughter when he picked up six pebbles, saying they were in search of some earwax. Suntanned and lying on my back on the grass, knees muddy and socks crumpled, me giggleful and naughty. I am a boy. All boys are brothers, and how I love my brothers. I am seven, seventeen and forty-seven, and he loves all my ages as I love all his.
    Garrulous, hungry for food and women, tubby, he slept in the bathtub and I loved to bathe him, to put toys in the water, to use sponges and flannels and rosewater and orange, and him so smallboyish until his fountain-flower decided to play too. Another time, sharing a bath, we sat sideways, watching miniature rally cars, cakes and small animals rocket past on the racetrack of the bathmat and he, aged five and a half, lay under a stripy towel in a DIY sauna, while he, aged forty-five and a half or sixty-five and a half, cried serious tears which broke through his face, rock them in though he did. ‘Why can’t we really live ? Do we lack the courage for it? I want to really live.’ So do I, my love, and I watch over him as if he was the child I had not had.
    He despised the merely managing, subsistence farming of the soul because he demanded to live by the electric passion, to let his body turn tidal, not walking pick-peck-pick on the mealy-mouthed pavement. I too demanded to really live, and we lived out our feral passion like teenagers; going to the market one day he threw me backwards and laughing across the stalls and nearly fucked me in full view of all the gawping shoppers. You want to love me? Do so. Quick now. Slip your strong keen up under my long red, feel my warm wet. And then come my gasp. But I wanted to live all my ages, not only as a teenager but as a mother and a grandmother. My friends said he was selfish and cruel, being so unwilling to have a child with me, but fatherhood